Scientists could have a clearer picture about how people from Polynesia moved back in the day based on chicken DNA from way back The International Business Times reported.
According to a study printed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the chickens, could have refrained from moving to South America.
"We were able to re-examine bones used in previous studies that had linked ancient Pacific and South American chickens, suggesting early human contact, and found that some of the results were contaminated with modern chicken DNA, which occurs at trace levels in many laboratory components," Professor Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA said in a statement The Times reported. "We were able to show that the ancient chicken DNA provided no evidence of any pre-Columbian contact between these areas."
"Indeed, the lack of the Polynesian sequences [of DNA] in modern South American chickens ... would argue against any trading contact as far as chickens go," Cooper told National Geographic.
"We can show [from chicken DNA] that the trail heads back into the Philippines. We're currently working on tracing it farther northward from there. However, we're following a proxy, rather than the actual humans themselves."
"The evidence for Polynesian contact with the New World prior to Columbus is substantial," David Burley, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada told The Times. "We have the sweet potato, the bottle gourd, all this New World stuff that has been firmly documented as being out here pre-Columbian. If the Polynesians could find Easter Island, which is just this tiny speck, don't you think they could have found an entire continent?"
The information scientists discovered does not give any details about chickens
"In chickens in particular we know that mitochondrial DNA doesn't tell us anything about the past," Allen Storey told the Australian Broadcast Corporation.
Storey printed a study in 2007 that found a chicken bone from 600 years ago with the same genetics as those in chicken bones in the Pacific while he was enrolled as a Ph.D student at the University of Auckland The Times reported.
