Wild chickens seem to have been common in India and East Asia (China, Thailand, and Vietnam) long ago, and that is where chickens were first domesticated (tamed), maybe around 7000 BC. Recent genetic evidence shows that people tamed chickens in two different places: in China and in India. Probably the people in each place didn't know that the other ones were also taming chickens. By about 5000 BC, people in China were certainly keeping chickens, and by 3000 BC people in India also had domesticated chickens. Source: http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/economy/chicken.htm

From the chicken book: The origins of the domestic fowl (Gallus domesticus, as the Romasn named it) go back tens of thousands of years. Charles Darwin, observing the Red Jungle Fowl of southeast Asia, identified it as the progenitor or the modern barnyard chicken. Some present-day archeologists assume the time of domestication to be in 3000B.C. and, following Darwin's lead, the place India, or the Indus valley. Others perfer Burma and others the Malay Peninsula. There is evidence that chickens were known in Sumer in the second millenium and the Sumero-Babylonian word for the cock was "the king bird."..In Egypt we find mention of chickens as early as the Second Dynasty...references in Greek writings of the fourth century B.C. to the fact that the Egyptians kept chickens and , moreover, that they were able to incubate large numbers of eggs...Indeed it was no accident that Egypt, like ancient China, was a mass society which mastered the technology of large-scale incubation. Some four thousand years ago the Egyptians invented incubators capable of hatching as many as ten thousand chicks at a time...From Greece, the chicken spread to Rome...When the Romans conquered Britain, they brought chickens with them...But they also found domestic fowl already there!" ______________________________________________________ From Historical Dictionary of Indian Food "Chicken. The Indian jungle fowl. Gallus gallus, is the acknowledge progenitor of domestic fowls the world over. It is native to a wide region all the way from Kashmir to Cambodia, with perhaps the centre of origin in the Malaysian land mass. The bird may have been domesticated not as a source of meat, but for purposes of divination...the fowl is a scavenger, and perhaps for this reason, the domestic fowl frequently finds a place in lists of foods prohibited for brahmans. For example, the Manusmriti includes in this category the domestic pig and the domestic fowl, and in AD 916 the visitor A-Masudi records prohibition agains 'cows, tame poultry, and all kinds of eggs among the people'...Other travellers however note the consumption of chicken as food. Chicken kabob, paloa with murgmasallam, and roasted fowl (dojaj) all figure in meals served at the Delhi Sultanate corut. In Vijayanagar, Domingo Pases remarks on 'poultry fowls, remarkably cheap', and in AD 1780 Mrs. Eliza Fay serves 'roast fowl' for lunch in Calcutta. Since good beef was scarce or unavailable, the domestic fowl was indeed the great colonial standby, whether at home or when travelling." _______________________________________________________ And then there is the South American chicken history. Chickens were spread by Polynesian seafarers and reached Easter Island in the 12th century CE, where they were the only domestic animal. Some think they also reached the Peruvian or Chilean coast. Araucanas, some of which are tailless and some of which have tufts of feathers around their ears, lay blue-green eggs. It has long been suggested that they predate the arrival of European chickens brought by the Spanish and are evidence of pre-Columbian trans-Pacific contacts between Asian or Pacific Oceanic peoples, particularly the Polynesians, and South America. In 2007, an international team of researchers reported the results of analysis of chicken bones found on the Arauco Peninsula in south central Chile. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the chickens were pre-Columbian, and DNA analysis showed that they were related to prehistoric populations of chickens in Polynesia. These results appear to confirm that the chickens came from Polynesia and that there were transpacific contacts between Polynesia and South America before Columbus's arrival in the Americas.

Nope, I pluck with great regularity, especially going through menopause. My husband wears the facial hair in the family, and that's enough:-)