What came first, the chicken or the egg?
It’s one of life’s great mysteries because you can’t have a chicken without an egg, but equally you can’t have an egg without a chicken.
This conundrum of logic has provided plenty of philosophical puzzlement over the years and served as the inspiration for an excellent closing joke in the acclaimed movie Chicken Run.
But as to the question for what actually did come first, a team of scientists from the University of Geneva believe they’ve definitively proven the answer.
In their study the team studied a creature called Chromosphaera perkinsii, a single cell organism discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii.
Apparently this little thing goes back over a billion years, even before the first animals roamed our planet, and it has solved a debate humans wanted to know the answer to for yonks.
The scientists found that this ancient species which has been around for ages is able to form multicellular structures which are incredibly similar to animal embryos.
In essence, this means that nature had the tools to make eggs before it could make animals and long before it could make chickens.
That would mean that the definitive answer to ‘chicken or egg’ would be a conclusive win for the egg, and indeed there were many species which laid eggs running around the planet long before anything close to a chicken came along.
On the other hand that seems somewhat like cheating because of course eggs existed before chickens were a thing.
When people want to know what came first between the chicken or the egg we all know they’re really thinking about a chicken or a chicken egg.
Did eggs exist before chickens? Yes, because chickens as we would recognise as such originated from an animal called the red junglefowl about 10,000 years ago and eggs have been around for so much longer.
Dinosaurs were laying eggs and they roamed around a lot longer than 10,000 years ago.
That’s basically opening up a whole new can of worms around whether you define eggs by what’s in them or where they came from.
Confused? Don’t be, it’s quite simple.
At some point a red junglefowl laid an egg with the first chicken in it, and if that egg is classed as a chicken egg because it had a chicken in it then the egg came first and the first chicken hatched from it.
Conversely, if you think that since a red junglefowl laid the egg that makes it a red junglefowl egg then the first chicken laid the first chicken egg and the chicken actually came first.
Basically, the right answer is probably egg, but feel free to argue the chicken’s corner if you like.