RED JUNGLEFOWL 205 
THE COCK IN HUMAN HISTORY 
Several years ago I had the enviable opportunity of sharing with Dr. John P. Peters 
an attempt to trace the relation of the cock to mankind from ancient historical times. 
There seems little doubt but that the original home or centre of distribution of the Red 
Junglefowl, the most anciently inhabited part of its present range, lies to the east and 
south, in the Burmese-Malayan portion of its habitat, rather than further east in China, 
or to the west in the Indian region. Distributional study of other birds, such as the 
Himalayan kaleege pheasants, makes it certain that these originated in Southern Burma 
and have since migrated westward, along an elongated sub-Himalayan finger, as far as 
Kashmir. The same holds true of a number of other-forms of life, both mammalian 
and avian. There is no doubt that the Red Junglefowl is of tropical or sub-tropical 
origin. Neither it nor its domesticated descendants can bear extreme cold; and the 
elaborately specialized exposed comb and wattles could have been evolved only in a 
warm country. ‘The three other species of Junglefowl are all tropical, and the affinities 
of the group among the other pheasants are altogether with Southern Chinese and 
Malayan genera. 
Like the mallard duck.and the rock dove, the Red Junglefowl has, for times long 
antedating human history, been a species especially susceptible to domestication, and 
with early civilizations such as arose in China and India, it is not surprising that 
domestication and variational breeding began before the proofs of hieroglyphics and 
written record. 
Tradition carries back the domestication of the cock in China to as early as 
1400 B.c., and the modern name for the bird, £2 or Raz, can be traced to the Chou 
Dynasty, which extended from 1122 to 249 B.c. In a very ancient dictionary £2 is 
defined as “the domestic animal which knows the time.” In the /7-ya, a glossary of 
the time of Confucius, it again is found. While there is evidence that in very early 
times the cock was an object for sacrifice in China, yet those people were quick to see 
the utilitarian value of the fowl, and to breed several distinct varieties. The Cochin 
China fowl is one of the most extreme, mutation-like of the early established breeds. 
In India it is necessary to depend upon literary rather than monumental evidence 
of the early occurrence of the cock. In the Indus period of the Aryan invasion, the time 
of the Rig Veda, there is no mention of the cock, but about 1000 B.c., when the Aryans 
had reached the Ganges, in the Atharua and the Yajur Vedas, the cock is well known. 
This supplements our zoological distribution theory, and also emphasizes the significance 
of the fact that Solomon’s Pheenicians, who found and imported the peacock from that 
part of India which they could reach by sea, did not find the cock. 
In the White Yajur Veda the name of the cock, kukkuta, is onomatopoetic. We 
read, ‘Then cut a cock whose tongue is sweet with honey; call to us manly vigour ; 
may we with thee in every fight be victors.” And a verse attributed to Chanakya, about 
320 B.C., says you may learn four things from a cock :— 
1. To fight; 2, to get up early; 3, to eat with your family; 4, to protect your 
spouse when she gets into trouble. 
If, as seems certain, the cock moved northward and westward, against the line of 
Aryan invasion, it should have reached Bactria and Persia at a very early date, and 
