Chickens in the Americas: the Spanish introduction, and the one bone that disputes it

Eighty-four per cent of native chickens sampled across mainland South America carry mitochondrial haplogroup E, the lineage that dominates Europe, and the Pacific lineage is absent from the continent altogether - which makes the Iberian introduction of the sixteenth century the measurable origin of the American farmyard bird. One directly dated bone from Arauco in Chile has been argued since 2007 to be older than that, and the argument is still running in print.