Turkeys domesticated not once, but twice

The new findings, reported this week by Canadian and American researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, come from a DNA analysis of ancient turkey bones and coprolites, the polite name for fossilized excrement.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that both strains of domesticated turkeys now are extinct, replaced by more highly inbred strains. The turkeys we eat today, moreover, are not descendants of the North American turkeys, but of those from Mesoamerica, which in a convoluted journey were taken to Europe by Spanish explorers, then re-exported to North America.

The findings “have really helped to clarify some of the questions archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time,” said archaeologist Jonathan C. Driver of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who was not involved in the research. It shows that the wild turkeys in the Southwest and Mesoamerica now “have nothing to do with the domestic turkey, that they are neither ancestor nor descendant.”

It also shows that there was only one breed of turkey in the Southwest, “that it was traded quite widely, and that its breeding was carefully controlled,” he said.

The history of turkeys is highly unusual in the context of other domesticated animals because it does not appear that they were originally raised in either region for their food value, as was the case with cows, sheep, pigs and other animals, said archaeologist Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut, who has studied turkeys extensively. She too was not involved in the research.

Evidence of turkey domestication in the Americas appears in remains from at least 2,000 years ago, but evidence from the first 1,000 years of that period suggests that the birds were raised for their feathers and ritual value, not for their meat. Middens ─ essentially garbage dumps ─ from the period contain “lots and lots of turkey poop and very few turkey bones,” said archaeologist Brian M. Kemp of Washington State University, a co-author of the study.

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