We assumed that Spanish conquistadores brought chickens to South American, but we were wrong. Thor Hyerdahl assumed that South Americans sailed on rafts to Polynesia. He got it wrong, too.
It was the other way around. A rare mutation in chickens first appeared in Tonga two thousand years ago. Descendants of those Tongan chickens were flourishing in Samoa 600 years ago, and at the same time, they showed up in Chile.
Scientist Alice Storey from New Zealand worked on the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The truth was revealed after a team stumbled across some old chicken bones in Chile, and decided to carbon-date them and DNA test them.
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