China's "Big Goose", the world's first

Author: Wen Lele

Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7,000 years ago in what is now China, according to an international team's study of well-preserved goose bones.

This may make them the first bird to be domesticated.

On March 7, the relevant results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

The discovery expands the history of goose domestication and possibly the history of poultry domestication as a whole, says Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum in Japan.

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Eda's team discovered 232 goose bones at an archaeological site in eastern China called Tianluoshan, a Stone Age village dating back between 7,000 and 5,500 years ago.

The people there were "basically hunter-gatherers," Eda said, but they also grew rice.

The researchers say there is multiple lines of evidence that some of these geese were domesticated.

Four of the bones belonged to goslings less than 16 weeks old — the youngest was probably less than eight weeks old.

Eda said this meant they must have hatched at Tianluo Mountain because they were too small to have flown in from anywhere else.

There are no wild geese breeding in the area today, and it is unlikely there were any 7,000 years ago, he said.

Some adult geese also appear to have been locally cultivated, based on the chemical composition of their bones, which reflects the water the geese drank.

These locally bred geese were roughly the same size, indicating that they were bred in captivity.

The researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the local captive geese lived about 7,000 years ago.

Taken together, the findings suggest that these geese were in the early stages of domestication, Eda said.

"This is an important study for our understanding of the history of poultry domestication," says Ophélie Lebrasseur of the Center for Human Biology and Genomics in Toulouse, France.

“What interested me most was that they radiocarbon dated the bones.”

This method provides much more reliable dating than simply dating the surrounding sediments, says Julia Best of Cardiff University in the UK.

If geese were domesticated 7,000 years ago, they would be the first domesticated bird, Eda said. Another candidate is the chicken, but when and where it was first domesticated is a matter of debate.

Chickens were probably domesticated from a wild bird called the red junglefowl that lived in southern Asia.

A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, based on DNA found in bones.

However, Best believes that the solid evidence for domesticated chickens appears around 5,000 years ago.

That means geese were domesticated long before chickens, Lebrasseur said. "Based on the evidence we have so far, I think that's true."

But compared with mammals like dogs and cattle, bird domestication is still understudied, so the story is likely to change as more evidence emerges, she said.

Related paper information:

https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.2117064119

China Science Daily (2022-03-09 Page 1 News original title: "Geese may be the first bird domesticated by humans")

Editor | Zhao Lu

Typesetting | Guo Gang