How the Chicken Crossed the World: The Story of the Bird that Powers Civilisations - Hardcover

'Science journalist Adrian Lawler explores the chicken's multipronged place in human civilization in his rip-roaring, erudite How the Chicken Crossed the World' * Nature * 'Lawler's book goes a long way toward restoring chickens to their respected position within human history and our modern world. Both chickens and people will benefit as a result.' * Science * 'Setting the record straight, Lawler's latest tome recasts the chicken as a "feathered Swiss Army knife" - a bird that has fuelled cultural, economic and scientific growth for several thousand years.' * The Guardian *

Queen Victoria was obsessed with it. Socrates' last words were about it. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using it. Hailed as a messenger of the gods, powerful sex symbol, gambling aid, all-purpose medicine and handy research tool, the humble chicken has been also cast as the epitome of evil, and the star of the world's most famous joke. Beginning with the recent discovery, that the chicken's unlikely ancestor is the T. Rex, How the Chicken Crossed the World tracks the chicken from its original domestication in the jungles of Southeast Asia some 10,000 years ago to today's Western societies, where it became the most engineered of animals, to the uncertain future of what is now humanity's single most important source of protein. In a masterful combination of historical sleuthing and journalistic exploration on four continents, Lawler reframes the way we feel and think about all domesticated animals and even nature itself.