The age-old question was finally answered.
You’ve almost certainly heard the question before, and much more so about the various justifications for each answer.
But which came first, the egg or the chicken?
Scientists have shared their information on the age-old enigma, which may now have a conclusive answer.
So, let’s look at the facts.
Domestic chickens as we know them first appeared about 10,000 years ago.
Does this imply that the egg arrived shortly before that?
What is an egg?
Many questions, but let us go back even earlier to see what Christian philosophers say. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas considered the topic and came up with a solution based on Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
This suggests that the chicken came first, as God created creatures.
But we are in the age of science, and we have long moved on from the aforementioned philosophers, who lived thousands of years ago.
So, here is some science for you.
According to BBC Science Focus, the answer is definitive.
Here we go: “Eggs are much older than chickens.
“Dinosaurs laid eggs, the fish that first crawled out of the sea laid eggs, and the weird articulated monsters that swam in the warm shallow seas of the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago also laid eggs,” states Luis Villazon.
He goes on to remark that, while these were not chicken eggs, they were still eggs.
A valid point, considering that the question does not specify which species the egg has to come from.
Villazon then said: “So the egg definitely came first.”
Problem solved – except he continued his explanation: “Unless you restate the question as ‘which came first, the chicken or the chicken’s egg?’ Then it very much depends on how you define a chicken’s egg.”
We then return to philosophy, where he questions whether an egg is laid by a chicken or an egg from which a chicken hatches.
Chickens are the’same species as the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia’, but they were later ‘hybridised’ with gray jungle fowl some 10,000 years ago, when they were domesticated.
Villazon eventually came to the following decision: “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.”
He then says it’s up to you if you want to label that egg a chicken’s egg, in which case the egg comes first.
If not, the chicken came first since the first chicken’s egg had to wait until it was laid.
Does this make sense? No? Still lost?
Essentially, it comes down to how picky you are about the egg being a chicken’s egg, and from there you will receive your answer.
