New Zealand's first chickens probably arrived on the boat with Captain James Cook, new research has found.
New Zealand's oldest chicken bones have been identified, found in Māori sites dating back to the 1770s - overlapping with Capt Cook's second voyage to New Zealand.
The bones predate regular European visitation, and scientists at Landcare Research and the University of Auckland think they're from "chickens, or progeny thereof, liberated during that voyage".
The oldest bone was found at a site at Redcliffs School in Christchurch. Others were plucked from sites in Queen Charlotte Sound, West Bay and Cloudy Bay in the South Island, and Black Head in Hawke's Bay.
"If chicken had been established in New Zealand by the first settlers, we believe chicken bones would be more abundant and widespread in middens [rubbish heaps] throughout the country, as they tend to be on other Polynesian islands where they were introduced and successfully established during prehistory," the study, published in Royal Society Open Science, claims.
The researchers speculate because New Zealand's earliest settlers would have been met by "large, easily hunted, flightless birds" there was no point in bothering to bring chickens along.
"Efforts to establish the domestic chicken, which required a certain amount of husbandry, may have been rapidly abandoned."
Because most easily hunted birds had been wiped out by the time Capt Cook arrived, "chickens became readily integrated into Māori livelihoods".
Newshub.
