%D 2022 %A Joris Peters %A Ophélie Lebrasseur %A Evan K Irving-Pease %A Ptolemaios Dimitrios Paxinos %A Julia Best %A Riley Smallman %A Cécile Callou %A Armelle Gardeisen %A Simon Trixl %A Laurent Frantz %A Naomi Sykes %A Dorian Q Fuller %A Greger Larson %V 119 %T The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens %N 24 %X SignificanceChickens are the world's most numerous domestic animal. In order to understand when, where, and how they first became associated with human societies, we critically assessed the domestic status of chicken remains described in >600 sites in 89 countries, and evaluated zoogeographic, morphological, osteometric, stratigraphic, contextual, iconographic, and textual data. Although previous studies have made claims for an early origin of chickens, our results suggest that unambiguous chickens were not present until ∼1650 to 1250 BCE in central Thailand. A correlation between early chickens and the first appearance of rice and millet cultivation suggests that the production and storage of these cereals may have acted as a magnet, thus initiating the chicken domestication process. %C United States %O © 2022 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). %L discovery10150429 %K domestication, chickens, dispersal, human niche %J Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America