Polynesian chickens in Chile? New furor, but they still look Polynesian.

A towering scientific furor has arisen over...chickens. Specifically, whether Polynesian voyagers introduced chickens to South America before the first Europeans showed up...carrying their own chickens.We'll get into some detail later, but the short version is this:It still looks clear that voyaging canoes from the Polynesian culture of the Pacific carried chickens to the Americas well before Christopher Columbus, despite a great deal of rancorous comment and competing scientific papers in the esteemed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists (PNAS).

Here's the longer version.In 2007, researchers led by Alice Storey of New Zealand published a paper on the dating and DNA analysis of chicken bones found at the El Arenal archaeological site in southern Chile.They found that 1) the bones dated to before Europeans first arrived in the Americas, and 2) the chickens were closely related genetically to early chickens found in Hawai'i and elsewhere in the Polynesian Pacific.

The inescapable conclusion was that the El Arenal chickens came from Polynesia, and since Polynesians, not South Americans, were a voyaging culture, that those chickens arrived on Polynesian voyaging canoes.Storey's paper was published in the PNAS in mid-2007. The same journal this week (July 28, 2008) published another chicken paper that challenges the Storey results.

It is: “Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA,” by Jaime Gongora, Nicolas J. Rawlence, Victor A. Mobegi, Han Jianlin, Jose A. Alcalde
, Jose T. Matus
, Olivier Hanotte, Chris Moran, Jeremy J. Austin, Sean Ulm, Atholl J. Anderson, Greger Larson, and Alan Cooper.In this one, Australian researcher Jaime Gongora argued that it might be premature to attribute those El Arenal chickens to a Polynesian voyager's introduction, in part because Gongora's team can't find Polynesian chicken DNA in modern South American chickens