Chicken

Charles Darwin identified the wild jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, Gallus gallus, as the biological forerunner of the domestic chicken, Gallus domesticus. These ancestral birds still exist both in their native areas and as escapees from domesticated and cockfighting flocks. As discomforting as cockfighting may seem to most Americans in the twenty-first century, it remains widespread among many cultures, having been called the most popular sport ever known to man (and it is almost exclusively a masculine pastime). There is a school of thought that domesticating birds for cockfighting predated the development of the chicken and the egg as food and facilitated the birds’ original adoption as a staple of the table.