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