Pork is still the most popular, closely followed by poultry.

A good thirteen kilograms per person are consumed in Germany every year.

Most is chicken.

According to a survey by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture on March 1, 2020, more than 159 million chickens and 11.6 million turkeys are kept as livestock in Germany.

All other poultry species, including geese, ranked under "also ran".

So far, the domestic fowl has also been considered the bird that was the first to be domesticated.

The Bankiva chicken, from which all chicken breeds descend, is originally native to South and Southeast Asia.

There it not only populates forests, but also extensive agriculture in the form of shifting cultivation offers favorable living conditions.

That this gallinaceous bird once began to roam around humans may have facilitated its domestication.

Archaeological finds testify that tamed chickens enriched the human diet four thousand years ago.

A group of Japanese and Chinese archaeologists have discovered that geese appear to have been domesticated thousands of years before chickens.

Goose bones from the Neolithic site of Tianluoshan in the lower Yangtze Valley in China provided the crucial clue to early pioneers of goose farming.

Using the radiocarbon method, the scientists working with Masaki Edaa from the University of Hokkaido dated the bones to between 7200 and 6700 years.

At that time there was a settlement of the Hemudu culture in Tianluoshan, whose farmers grew rice on flooded fields and possibly also kept pigs.

They also fished and hunted avidly, as indicated by the contents of their waste pits.

An oxygen isotope provides information

The researchers identified the bird bones dug out of the prehistoric rubbish as the remains of rails, ducks and geese.

Apparently, these were mainly migratory birds that populated the subtropical swamp and lake landscape in winter.

Nowadays, the wide lower part of the Yangtze Valley hosts six different species of geese as winter visitors.

Not a single one can be seen there during the breeding season, and there is no evidence that they behaved differently six to seven thousand years ago.

However, some bones of juvenile geese have also been found in the Neolithic waste pits.

One is from a bird that was no more than eight weeks old.

So definitely still too young to be able to complete the flight from the breeding area to the winter quarters.

Could this young gosling belong to a population that lived under the care of rice farmers?

Then there should also be bones from adult geese that have lived there all their lives.

And indeed, Masaki Edaa and his colleagues tracked down such goose bones.

The method of comparing the content of oxygen of mass number 18 (18O) in the calcium phosphate of the bones of geese and less mobile mammals proved instructive.

Depending on the climatic conditions, the proportion of this rare, non-radioactive oxygen isotope in nature varies.

In the lower Yangtze Valley, for example, the rainwater - the water that geese drink - contains more 18O than in the breeding areas much further north.

Therefore, the birds here build correspondingly more of it in their bodies.

Four out of 25 examined goose bones from Tianluoshan turned out to be the remains of sedentary individuals.

Apparently these geese had never left the area, which usually only serves as winter quarters,