If chickens only descended from red junglefowl 8,000 years ago, that is a blip on the evolutionary timescale, which is a process taking millions of years. For comparison, horses and donkeys which can still breed and make mules, diverged 4 million years ago.
The offspring of chickens and RJF are able to reproduce and there are people worried that interbreeding with chickens will have problems for the wild population. But if this is the case, why are they considered separate species instead of the junglefowl just being considered a wild chicken?
In: Biology
Domestication and the accelerated rate of selective breeding that comes with it drastically changes the “evolutionary scale”.
It’s like a cheat code.
Interbreeding isn’t the determining factor in taxonomic speciation.
Domestic dogs and horses, both of which have been at mankind’s side for a very long time, are merely subspecies of their feral forebears.
And that’s the exact same situation the domestic chicken is in. *Gallus gallus domesticus*
Also, domestic chickens have been genetically influenced by grey junglefowl and green junglefowl along the way, so they’re not pure red junglefowl.
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