Which came first, the chicken or the egg
Publish Time: 2023-09-15 Origin: Phoenix Breeding Equipment
It's a simple question. But if the egg came first, then who laid it? After all, eggs come from chickens. And if the chicken came first then where did it come from? Because chickens hatch from eggs. So which came first?
Taken at face value, there is no doubt that the egg came before the chicken. We tend to think of eggs as the shelled orbs laid by birds from which their chicks hatch – unless we eat them first. But all sexually reproducing species make eggs (the specialised female sex cells). That’s 99.99 per cent of all eukaryotic life – meaning organisms that have cells with a nucleus, so all animals and plants, and everything but the simplest life forms.
Well, you'll be relieved to learn that there is a clear answer as to which came first – and the answer lies in how animals evolved.
Was the Egg First?
Eggs have existed in nature for more than a billion years, long before any chicken was on the scene. Technically, an egg is just a container bound by membrane which allows an embryo to grow and develop. Almost all sexually reproducing species make eggs, which are the specialized female sex cells.
In nature, living things evolve through changes in their DNA. In an animal like a chicken, DNA from a male sperm cell and a female ovum (egg) meet and combine to form a zygote, the first cell of a new baby chicken. This first cell divides innumerable times to form all of the cells of the complete animal. In any animal, every cell contains exactly the same DNA, and that DNA comes from the zygote. Eventually, a baby chick will hatch from the eggs laid by a hen and either a budding hen or rooster will be revealed. Once the chickens hatch the process starts all over again.
We don’t know for sure when sex evolved but it could have been as much as 2 billion years ago, and certainly more than 1 billion. Even the specialised sort of eggs laid by birds, with their tough outer membrane, evolved more than 300 million years ago.
As for chickens, they came into being much later. They are domesticated animals, so evolved as the result of humans purposefully selecting the least aggressive wild birds and letting them breed. This seems to have happened in several places independently, starting around 10,000 years ago.
Although eggs predated chickens, these were not chicken eggs. The first chicken would have been a genetic mutation from two other birds that we might call proto-chickens. This domestication process happened over a long period of evolutionary history, during which the genetic makeup of non-chickens was edited through small changes caused by the mixing of male and female DNA or by mutations to the DNA that produced the zygote. These changes and mutations only have an effect when a new zygote is created. That is, two non-chickens mated and the DNA in their new zygote contained the mutation(s) that produced the first chicken like the ones we know and love today.
Scientists believe that the parents of the first chickens were red junglefowl, which are native to Southeast Asia. These particular birds lay a lot of eggs and are not as aggressive as many other species, so humans domesticated them. No one knows exactly when this happened, but it likely occurred around 10,000 years ago. So, if a chicken developed from a red junglefowl egg, then you could argue that the chicken came first and afterward produced the first chicken egg.
So, What Came First?
DNA analysis has shown that the chicken diverged from the red junglefowl perhaps 58,000 years ago, and also that the genes for the chicken's yellow color may have come from the gray junglefowl, implying there was some kind of interbreeding going on. Since we believe that the first chickens came into existence at the hands of human intervention, we say that the egg came before the chicken. Before that first true chicken zygote, there were only non-chicken species. The zygote cell is the only place where DNA mutations could produce a new animal, and the zygote cell is housed in the chicken's egg. So, the egg must have come first.
But it doesn’t matter; at some point in evolutionary history when there were no chickens, two birds that were almost-but-not-quite chickens mated and laid an egg that hatched into the first chicken. If you are prepared to call that egg a chicken’s egg, then the egg came first. Otherwise, the chicken came first and the first chicken’s egg had to wait until the first chicken laid it.
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