29.
4. 85
Dear
Mr Plant,
Thank
you for your letter concerning the Domestic Fowl. While identifying fossil
bones I came on remains of a Gallus
species in the middle to late Pleistocene of England, not apparently
associated with human activity.
I
considered that these were not of the same species as the Indian Red
Junglefowl Gallus gallus and, as you
will see from the enclosed separate, I named the new bird Gallus europaeus.
I
summarised slightly more complete evidence on truly fossil Gallus for a book on domestic fowl in archaeology which is being
prepared by Dr Brothwell of the Institute or Archaeology in London.
When
I prepared an Atlas of the birds of the Western Palaearctic (Collins 1982) I
listed some of the distribution patterns resulting from the Pleistocene
glaciations of Eurasia as a whole. In many instances two species occurred, a
western and an eastern one, on either side of the cold Tibetan-Altai barrier.
In
some instances a third species was also present in the Indian region south of
the Himalaya.
In
the case of the Junglefowls there appeared to be a pattern like the last, and
I commented in the enclosed paper on the apparent absence of the
third species in eastern Asia. Sally Rodwell’s finding of the
junglefowl bones in a Northern Chinese stone-age culture, eight thousand years
ago, unconnected with the Indian birds and antedating the assumed
domestication of the Red Junglefowl by several thousand years, appears to
provide the missing part completing the distributional pattern of these forms.
By analogy with other species groups it seemed most likely that these had, in
isolation, achieved the rank of separate species.
If
the European Junglefowl survived the last glaciation, then the finds of very
early Gallus in Europe might be
referable to this species and not, as had been assumed in the past, evidence
of the early spread of domesticated Red Junglefowl. It screws up the picture.
If
the hypothesis is correct then the full range of domestic breeds at present
assigned to Gallus gallus might
conceal the presence of three separate genotypes or hybrids. I had hoped that
Sally Rodwell would have been able to write this up as her Ph. D. thesis but
she appears to have run into difficulties.
I
would be interested to see your booklet on bones, but as some comments in my
paper indicate, a cautious re-appraisal is needed in a number of cases,
particularly for 19th
century identification.
Yours
sincerely,
Colin
Harrison