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Updated Monday, February 8, 2010 10:40 am TWN, By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times



	Some of Rennie Graves' free-range turkeys recently stomp the grounds near Buckner, Missouri, as they were headed to the slaughterhouse the next day. (MCT) More Photos (2)

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Turkeys domesticated not once, but twice

Bones found from the period are typically of intact birds buried under houses and elsewhere. All the evidence suggests, Munro said, that turkeys were raised for ritualistic purposes and for the use of their feathers for ornaments and in clothing, robes and blankets.

“It gets really cold at night in the Southwest,” Kemp said, “and turkey feather blankets are thermally superior to rabbit fur.”

A major change began in about the year 1100. Turkey bones began appearing much more commonly in middens. Archaeologists believe that this change was associated with the increasing population density of the region and the hunting to near extinction of desirable prey animals such as deer and antelope.

By the 1200s, “turkey completely dominates the animal bones in middens,” Driver said. The Pueblo people “were turning to an already domesticated animal and creating a new purpose for it.”

The dynamic changed again 250 years later after the Spanish arrived and introduced sheep and chicken. Turkeys began disappearing from the middens and soon were replaced almost entirely by the imported animals, which required less care.

The new research came from two groups. Kemp and his colleagues at Washington State were studying DNA in coprolites from the two regions, while archaeologists Camilla F. Speller and Dongya Y. Yang of Simon Fraser were studying it in bones. They joined forces, and both approaches yielded the same results: that domestication was occurring simultaneously in the Southwest and Mesoamerica.

The researchers concluded that domestication occurred at least twice: once in Mesoamerica, probably in south-central Mexico, involving the South Mexican wild turkey, and once in the Southwest involving the Rio Grande/Eastern wild turkey populations. They found no evidence that the two strains had ever intermingled.

Analysis of DNA from turkeys purchased in stores in the United States and Canada showed that these were descended from the Mesoamerican strain and arrived in the continent via Europe, confirming what most experts already believed.

Driver cautioned that these two strains were probably not similar to modern turkeys, which have been bred to bear so much meat that they can no longer fly. “They would be more like wild turkeys in terms of body shape. They wouldn't be very large or very fat ... but there was a reasonable amount of meat on them.”

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