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