Eggs: Early Egg History

The naturalist Charles Darwin named the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) as the wild ancestor of today’s modern chicken (Gallus domesticus), although there may have been as many as four species of similar birds that were domesticated in Asia three or four thousand years ago. Keeping chickens for divination and fighting was just as important as keeping them for food, but eventually humans realized that the chicken’s habit of laying eggs in clutches allowed people to remove eggs from under the hens, motivating the hens to lay more and providing a continuous supply of eggs. Generally, wild birds lay eggs only in the spring, but with domestication chickens would lay on a more regular cycle. The eggs could then be eaten or hatched in special incubators. The Egyptians and the Chinese, who both needed to feed an able-bodied workforce to build their elaborate construction projects, devised ways of hatching eggs on a grand scale. The Egyptians constructed large heated clay buildings where they turned eggs by hand and were thus capable of hatching ten to fifteen thousand eggs at a time, a feat duplicated in modern times only since about 1925.