Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

_{Scientists provide the answer from an evolutionary perspective.}

One question has always puzzled thinkers since the dawn of humanity: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
On World Egg Day, MailOnline posed this question to evolution experts.

Although eggs evolved millions of years before the appearance of chickens, scientists affirm that this does not necessarily mean that the egg came before the chicken.

What is the egg?

Eggs have existed for a long time, “estimated to be as old as life itself.”

Except for mammals, most animals lay eggs. According to Jules Howard, author of the book “Endless Forms,” which discusses the evolution of eggs, eggs were a means of evolution for transferring genes to future generations.
And before the appearance of eggs, living organisms reproduced by cloning, which made them susceptible to destruction due to diseases. As for eggs, they contributed to the emergence of genetic diversity and the ability to resist diseases and parasites.

The first eggs were completely different from the shape we know today, and they were probably laid by primitive creatures like jellyfish or marine worms hundreds of millions of years ago. About 600 million years ago, the eggs were very small, barely larger than a human hair, and were pumped through the oceans before settling on the seabed.

And since that distant time, living beings relied on this primitive form of reproduction, which means that the egg came millions of years before the chicken appeared.

What is chicken?

The origin of domestic chickens traces back to a type of red chicken called Gallus gallus, which evolved about 50 million years ago.

Initially, it was believed that humans domesticated chickens about 10,000 years ago, but new research suggests that domestication may have occurred between 1650 and 1250 BC, or about 3,500 years ago, in Southeast Asia, where the birds adapted to human presence and gradually evolved into what we now know as chickens, or Gallus gallus domesticus.

Which came first: the dinosaur or the egg?

While the age of chickens does not exceed a few thousand years, eggs date back millions of years, as the history of the first known egg goes back to the Carboniferous period, approximately 358 to 298 million years ago.
And that egg belonged to primitive reptiles, and it might have had a soft shell.

In the early Jurassic period, hard-shell eggs evolved, and dinosaurs were the first to lay such eggs. Fossilized eggs dating back 195 million years were found, laid by long-necked dinosaurs such as the “Brontosaurus and Diplodocus,” which closely resemble the eggs of many modern birds and reptiles.

In 2023, scientists discovered a massive nesting site containing 91 nests of titanosaur, a type of dinosaur, with 256 eggs, indicating that these giant dinosaurs nested together like birds.

The argument in favor of the chicken

Although eggs are clearly older than chickens from an evolutionary perspective, the answer depends on how the question is interpreted.

If the question is about the “chicken egg,” then the first chicken must have hatched from an egg laid by its wild ancestor. So, according to this interpretation, it can be said that the chicken came first.

And the conclusion according to scientists is: From an evolutionary perspective, the egg certainly came before the chicken. However, if the question specifically concerns the chicken egg, then the first chicken must have hatched before the first “real chicken egg” was laid.

^{Source: Daily Mail}

About The Author