Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  We move into the third and most restricted part of the lab, a series of glass-walled rooms with windows looking out over the botanical garden’s roses. The yellow-painted room, with space for only a desk and chair and a long and narrow counter, is designated solely for animal DNA material. This is where Macqueen uses a technique called polymerase chain reaction—PCR—to make thousands and even millions of copies of those nice little tiny degraded fragments. Even tiny surviving portions of DNA in a badly degraded bone can then be analyzed with relative ease. This obscure technology, developed in the early 1980s, won its inventors the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for opening the door to reading the genetic code embedded in all living things. “The last thing you do is add the DNA to a test tube, clean it, and put it in the machine,” she says. “You close the door, and from then on it is amplified DNA.”

  The next job is to clean, clean some more, and clean again. The desk, the counter, the chair, everything must be wiped down with disinfectant to ensure that as little stray DNA remains in this room as possible. The invisible strands from one sample could contaminate the next sample that comes through the door, so such precautions are critical. She spends more time cleaning than conducting the actual work, and she must work efficiently and in isolation. You can’t leave the lab for a bathroom break without going through the entire preparation protocol all over again, and tight restrictions limit how many times a day you can reenter. All food and drink, including the coffee and chocolate she likes, are forbidden. Even the building is set apart from the rest of the campus, in the middle of the arboretum, to create yet another barrier from contamination.

  Once the DNA is safely copied, she might store some in a freezer and carry the rest in a tube to the biology building, a ten-minute walk away. Until recently, she had to hurry on hot days, since high temperatures could degrade the sample. But now she uses a new chemical that stabilizes the precious material and she can stroll through the gardens on her way to campus. Still, the work is demanding and often frustrating. “Getting mitochondrial DNA out of these old bones is a struggle,” she says, reflexively wiping down a counter for a second time. “You have to decide what samples are worth a go.”

  We dispose of our protective wear and Macqueen grabs her coat and leather backpack to take me to the lab’s offices across campus. At a café in the garden, she tells me that she grew up on a farm in northern Australia with cattle and chickens. Later she worked in Southeast Asia on development programs designed to improve poultry for the rural poor, where they introduced the large, heavy-breasted chickens favored in the West, the birds that resulted from combining European and Asian breeds in the past century. Locals in Laos and Cambodia preferred their smaller and scrawnier birds that lay fewer eggs. “They thought their village chickens tasted a lot better, and they were right,” she says. The project failed and she moved on.

  What struck her during her time in Southeast Asia was that the bird was something more than just food; it was a multipurpose animal for amusement, religious ritual, and gambling. In ancient Polynesia, the bird’s meat and eggs were of course a source of fresh food on long voyages, although, like many tribal peoples of Southeast Asia, Polynesians never appear to have been major egg eaters. Instead, they used the bones for sewing and tattooing, the feathers for decoration, and the roosters as an excuse to gamble. Cockfighting was associated with religious ritual as well as entertainment. Ruaifaatoa was the god of cockfighting in Tahiti, where tradition held that chickens were made at the same time as humans.

  Macqueen drops me off at the office of Alan Cooper, who directs the center and helped define the strict protocols for ancient DNA research when it began in earnest a dozen years ago. The New Zealander has feathered hair and a boyish face and speaks quickly, as if he’s perpetually late for his next meeting. “The Pacific is a basket case,” he says. For archaeologists, the vast region is no paradise. “There are not enough human bones, preservation isn’t good, and it is a hard place to work.” Animal remains offer a better alternative way to chart the movement of humans, since they are more common than those of humans and don’t upset locals fearful that the tombs of their ancestors will be desecrated. Not all Polynesian colonists carried the same plants and animals. No prehistoric pig or dog bones have been found on Easter Island, for example. “And rats,” says Cooper, “are a pain in the ass.” They could have stowed away on boats that traveled back and forth among islands, and their relentless comings and goings make their genetic signature even more scrambled than that of the chicken.

  The bird, he adds, is proving the best way to reconstruct human colonization of the Pacific. Any chicken remains found west of Bali, the eastern edge of the red jungle fowl’s home range, are signs that humans carried the bird in boats. By pinpointing combinations of DNA sequences, haplotypes assigned letters like A, B, C, and D, molecular biologists can connect the dots of this movement from west to east across the Pacific. Old bones like Burney’s are rare, so the search also embraces DNA samples from modern chickens that may still contain pre-European genes. Cooper’s team extracted DNA from 122 modern and 22 ancient chicken samples from across the Pacific, and discovered that the vast majority, both ancient and modern, shared the same haplotype—designated as “D.”

  The ones that did not share the D group—mostly of the E ­haplotype—came from more populated areas that have a longer history of contact with the outside world in recent times. Samples that Macqueen retrieved from more remote villages of Vanuatu, six hundred miles southeast of the Solomon Islands, for example, were of the D type, as were four ancient bones found by Burney in Maukauwahi and six samples from a prehistoric site on Easter Island. This particular haplotype combines four specific genetic sequences that allow researchers to simulate various migration routes of chickens—and therefore people—from west to east. “Polynesian chickens may be one of the few examples where ancestral genetic patterns can still be observed in a domesticated species,” Cooper and colleagues state in a 2014 paper. These birds also may still harbor some of the world’s last undisturbed genetic material from precolonial chickens.

  Cooper’s team found that people took two primary routes. The first stretched from New Guinea to Micronesia on the northern end of Polynesian expansion. Once they reached Micronesia, a scattering of small islands, they stayed put. Some modern chickens on the isolated Micronesian island of Guam—fifteen hundred miles due east of the Philippines—contain a unique form of haplotype D not shared with other Pacific islands, while other Guam birds are linked to a subgroup found in the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia. Micronesia was out of the mainstream of Polynesian expansion. By contrast, the ancient chickens of Easter Island and Hawaii appear to have moved across a southern route that passed through New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and then east. The ancestors of the birds found by Burney came via Melanesia, a vast island group that includes the Solomon Islands and stretches east to Fiji.

  Such finds combined with new dating of bones, pottery, and artifacts from archaeological digs across the Pacific suggest that humans took big leaps and then paused. The first and longest halt was at the Solomons, east of New Guinea, separated from the next set of islands by more than two hundred miles. By 1200 BC, when Ramses the Great was on Egypt’s throne and the first chickens clucked in Egypt, early Polynesians were working their way into the open ocean as far as Fiji. There they remained until Samoa and Tonga were settled, about 900 BC. There was another long hiatus in successful voyages east, as explorers faced the daunting void in the middle of the world’s largest ocean, until two millennia later, around the eleventh century AD, when settlers colonized the Society Islands in the central South Pacific. The last burst of movement took place as late as the thirteenth century—several centuries later than once thought—when Polynesians finally made landfall on the Hawaiian archipelago and Easter Island.

  The origin of the culture that birthed the Polynesian expansion remains murky. Archaeologists call it Lapita, a name that comes from a
site on the island of New Caledonia, halfway between New Guinea and New Zealand, that was dug in the 1950s. Since then archaeologists have found hundreds of sites with similar remains scattered throughout the region. These include stone axes, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, gourds, taro, bananas, bamboo, turmeric, pigs, rats, dogs, and chickens. There were also stowaways like snails. The people lived in houses on stilts, baked food in earthen ovens, and fished. But how these objects, plants, animals, and traditions came together, where these people came from, and how and when they spread to every major island remain hotly debated.

  One view is that the Lapita people were rice-farming immigrants in China who crossed the sea to Taiwan, moved south to the Philippines and Indonesia, bypassed the inland farm peoples of larger islands like New Guinea, and then hit the open ocean. Others argue that they emerged from the mass of islands between Indonesia and the Philippines and then spread east into Melanesia and into the Pacific. A third group argues that Polynesians didn’t travel to Melanesia at all but were indigenous to the area. The disagreements, which often hinge on arcane linguistic theories, reveal just how little archaeological material exists.

  Cooper’s team has intriguing hints that the domesticated chicken first joined the Lapita package at an early stage, in the Philippines. All four of those unique genetic subgroups in haplotype D were found in one modern chicken from the little southern Philippine island of Camiguin. A Filipino graduate student has five hundred modern samples and ten ancient ones from around the archipelago, which he hopes to connect to birds on the mainland of Southeast Asia or in Indonesia. That could help pinpoint an origin of the mysterious early Polynesians.

  Since haplotype D is associated with game-fowl breeds from Japan to the Philippines to India, cockfighting may have been a major factor in the spread of the chicken beyond its home turf. The possibility that the chicken’s ability to fight may have trumped its meat-and-egg capacities in ancient times intrigues scientists. No people on earth have bred the gamecock as avidly as Filipinos. Since the sixteenth century, the island chain has been known as the home of some of the world’s greatest varieties of fighting birds. Even today in the Philippines, cockfighting remains as central to traditional life as bullfighting is in Spain. Forgotten or disdained in much of the industrial world today, the sport was likely a catalyst in the chicken’s spread around the world.

  5.

  Thrilla in Manila

  So lively an Emblem of true Valour is the well bred-Cock, that he is not to be parall’d amongst the many Creatures which the wise Creator of all things has been pleased to make Man the Lord and Master of.

  —Robert Howlett, The Royal Pastime of Cock-fighting

  The World Slasher Cup is the Super Bowl of cockfighting, a five-day series of 648 matches held in a coliseum in downtown Quezon City in metro Manila. Outside the sleek chrome entrance, a thirty-foot-high inflated rooster sways in the hot breeze, advertising a formula feed. Next to the event poster featuring two cocks in combat is a bill announcing the fiftieth Miss Philippines contest, displaying a beautiful woman in a teal-blue low-cut dress. Ice Capades just finished a run and Dionne Warwick will be coming soon. But for now, the ­twenty-thousand-seat arena is devoted to the Filipinos’ favorite traditional pastime and humanity’s oldest spectator sport after boxing.

  In 1975, this was the site of the famous bout pitting Joe Frazier against Muhammad Ali for the title of world heavyweight champion, the legendary Thrilla in Manila. In the annual Slasher Cup competition, two gamecocks, each armed with a long, curved steel spur, will battle to the death. Big screens make it easy to watch the combat even from the upper tiers. When I arrive there are four men in the ring, two of them calmly squatting, each with a cigarette between his lips and a chicken between his legs. The other two are referees. Thousands of spectators, all men, are standing and shouting, making distinctive hand gestures to one another around the vast space. The noise is deafening.

  Suddenly, the squatting smokers release the birds, and the roosters approach each other at a wary angle, reptilian hackles rising like rainbow-colored umbrellas from their necks. As they explode forward with the speed and aim of heat-seeking missiles, the clamor outside the ring abruptly halts. Feathers, legs, and a flash of steel fill the screens. The only sound is the vibration of pounded air from hard-flapping wings. In less than a minute it is over. The white-­feathered victor sends up a triumphant crow next to the still body of its dead opponent. Losers pay up their bets in a rain of folded peso notes as the loudspeaker blares the pop tune “Eye of the Tiger.”

  “Here in the cheap seats, they are betting ten to a hundred dollars a match,” says Rolando Luzong, my cockfighting guide. We are sitting halfway up, where the crowd thins out. “But there in the ­preferencia”—he points at the VIP bleachers next to the ring—“they are betting a thousand to ten thousand dollars.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars are passing hands with each of the 648 matches. The owner who scores the most points at the end of the meet will get a check for thirty-five thousand dollars and a laudatory article and picture in the sports sections of the Manila papers. The real money, Luzong tells me, goes to breeders profiting from selling individual winning birds to sire lines of future champions, and to the companies hawking steel blades, supplements, shampoos, and special feed for the tens of thousands of gamecocks throughout the country and beyond.

  Luzong makes his living from cockfighting, not as a gambler or breeder but as a journalist, website developer, public-relations specialist, and industry consultant. In his bright-red shirt advertising Thunderbird feed, he’s an unabashed promoter of a sport that is illegal and reviled in half the world. Middle-aged with jet-black hair, a deep slouch, and a belly as round as his face, Luzong came late to the business. Pushing thirty, he landed a job writing for a game-fowl magazine and discovered that he was less interested in the gambling aspect than in the peculiar names of bird varieties—Roundhead, Butcher, Sweater. Luzong later spent a decade at Manila’s Roligon Mega Cockpit as public-relations chief and then as general manager. The pit is the world’s largest, an enormous stadium near the airport.

  As we sit through another match, he explains the rules. First, potential rivals are compared and weighed to ensure an equal match. Then the artificial spur is fitted and tied like a boxer’s glove to each bird’s left foot—the natural bony spur is amputated while they are young—and carefully wrapped in a protective covering. The ring manager and the game-fowl owners agree on a betting figure for the winner, and each fighter is assigned one side of the ring. These are the inside bets. The bird most favored to win is on the side called Meron (with a hat) and the other is on the Wala (without a hat). This comes from the tradition of one owner wearing a hat while the other goes bareheaded to ensure that spectators know which owner’s bird they are betting on. In the twenty-first-century Smart Araneta Coliseum, the words are spelled out on large electronic signs hanging above the boxing-match-sized ring.

  Only four people are in the ring at one time—two handlers, a referee, and an assistant referee. In the two thousand or so village pits around the Philippines, a handler usually is also the owner. In the high-roller world of cockfighting, however, specialists are hired. Once in the ring, they typically work the cocks into an angry and agitated state using another bird brought for this express purpose. Spectators then have a chance to judge where to put their money. Once the inside betting is completed, betting managers around the ring spread their arms—they are called Kristos in this overwhelmingly Catholic country because of their crucifixion-like stance—and solicit bets from the crowd.

  This was the din I was hearing just before the first match. That noise builds as individuals bet with the Kristos or among themselves using well-known hand signals that specify the number of pesos being wagered. Meanwhile, in the ring, the blades are unwrapped and the birds are released. All betting ceases the moment they engage. “The fastest one I’ve seen lasted eight seconds,” Luzong says as a rooster dives o
n its opponent in the ring far below. If a match lasts ten minutes, it is considered a draw. But most are over in a couple of minutes. If a cock goes down for the count, the referee will pick them both up. If one pecks but the other doesn’t, then the pecker is the winner. If both die, the one with the most pecks wins.

  In nearly every case, only one bird leaves the ring alive. There is not much blood to be seen, even with the big-screen videos providing up-close action shots. Occasionally, a cleaning crew mops up dashes of crimson. Dead losers are unceremoniously carried away while injured victors are taken to a makeshift triage station in a room behind the bleachers where veterinarians apply painkillers and stitch up those birds that might one day enter the ring again. But it is a rare bird that returns to fight more than twice. Serial winners are highly sought after to sire a new line, and the lucky owner can expect fame and fortune. “If you win three times, you will have as many girls as you want,” Luzong tells me.

  Until a game fowl is a serial winner, however, it has no name. If your bird wins, you get a single point; a draw gets you a half point, and a loss none. The contest is about the human rather than the animal. Like the metal contestants in shows such as BattleBots or Robot Wars that were popular a decade ago, the bird is simply an extension of its owner.