Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Bradley T. Lepper: New study fires up pre-Columbian Polynesia-Chile chicken debate
Scientists studying pre-Columbian chicken bones from a site in Chile said that its DNA matched that of Polynesian chickens rather than Spanish chickens. This appeared to clinch the argument that Polynesian voyagers had landed in America as much as two centuries before Columbus.

However, a new analysis of those chicken bones, published in the July 29 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that the Chilean chicken didn't come from Polynesia after all. Moreover, the bones aren't as old as the original investigators thought.


I linked to an earlier version of this story and noted that the dating needed to be checked; looks like it was. . . .