April
25, 1985
Dear
Mr Plant:
Many
thanks for the very interesting letter on origin of chickens. My work of which
you have a copy was published as Chapter 42 - Domestic
fowl in: Mason, I.L., editor, Evolution
of domesticated animals, Longman, London and New York, 1984, ISBN
0-582-46066-8. I also authored chapters on turkeys, and geese, in that volume.
If
you have difficulty in locating the references which I cited in the chicken
chapter, I would be pleased to send xerox copies from my files. Certainly some
of them were difficult for me to locate.
I
am especially interested in whatever information you can pass along concerning
Chinese findings. Research workers in the western world are badly handicapped
by not having good access to oriental literature. The only reference that I
could locate when working on the chicken chapter was the one by Ping-Ti Ho
(1977), that consisted of a chapter in the C.A. Reed book Origins
of agriculture, Mouton: The Hague and Paris. That chapter described
chicken bone finds in Northern China which were radiocarbon dated to about
4000 B.P. Unfortunately there was no clear indication in Ho’s account
whether these finds represented wild chickens or a domestic form, hence my own
conclusion that the evidence indicated at least that junglefowl had a much
wider distribution in former times than they do at present. I will be very
interested in reading Mrs. Rodwell’s work when it is published since it
probably pertains to this question.
I
would be most interested in reading your work on Chicken
bone recoveries and thank you for offering to send me a copy.
Preparation
of the book chapters for Mason was a joy, and a welcome diversion from my
usual teaching and research work in single gene genetics and animal genetic
resources conservation. My interest continues and I would very much enjoy
continuing correspondence with you.
Yours
very truly,
R.D.Crawford,
Ph.D.,
Professor