Geese may be the oldest domesticated bird in world history, with evidence from China suggesting that this avian species may have coexisted with humans thousands of years ago, according to a new discovery published on Monday in the international academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers indicated that ancient goose bones collected from a 7,000-year-old rice-farming village in Zhejiang Province, eastern China, demonstrate that domestication began in the 5th millennium BCE during the Neolithic period.
Goose farming.
“The interesting point is that the oldest domesticated bird species is not the chicken, but the goose,” said Masaki Eda, an associate professor at Hokkaido University in Japan and the lead author of the study. He also mentioned that this finding challenges the long-held belief that chickens were the earliest domesticated poultry in the world.
In contrast to chickens, which are the most commonly raised poultry in China and globally, geese currently represent a secondary poultry species. Although China dominates global goose meat production, this animal is not a primary food source on Chinese dining tables, aside from a few popular dishes like roasted goose.
The evidence also supports findings from the Tianluoshan area of Zhejiang Province, which contains remnants of a rice-farming village from the ancient Hemudu culture. Researchers discovered several skeletons belonging to locally bred geese, whose diet may have included rice from the village—unlike migratory geese—indicating signs of early domestication.
Based on butchering and crafting marks on the bones, researchers suggest that the locally bred geese provided raw materials for tools and supplementary food for humans at that time. Professor Eda noted that geese were not the main source of meat even back then, with venison and duck being more prevalent on the dining table.
With evidence indicating a long history of goose domestication dating back to the Neolithic period, researchers propose that the locally bred geese in Tianluoshan may be the ancestors of today’s domestic geese in Europe.
Meanwhile, researchers also pointed out that while some studies have traced the initial domestication of chickens back to the early 9th millennium BCE, the reliability of this evidence remains highly “questionable.” According to Eda, a more widely accepted conclusion suggests that the earliest domestication of chickens occurred over 2,000 years ago in India.
