Cite? (I’m genuinely curious.)
And they didn’t have time to spread very far from the west coast of South America before the Spanish arrived and introduced European or Asian breeds. They were not present in North America or the Caribbean at the time of contact.
from experience, yes.
Beat me on the draw! :smack:
Agreed, chickens will eat damn near anything, that doesn’t eat them first. 
I met an old Yupik man once that told me that the missionaries came to his village when he was a kid and attempted to raise chickens and failed. Now they sell chicken at the village store of course but the Yupik did apparently did not have chicken. Duck and other wild waterfowl were very popular however.
In fairness, if you consider the size of some moas, it may have been self-defense as much as dinner. Sure, they were herbivores, but anything that size can be dangerous when provoked or defending its young.
Is it now accepted consensus that Polynesians made it to the Americas? I thought that was a minority view. And Blake’s cite also mentions Chinese pottery, which I find even less believable.
I wouldn’t call it an accepted consensus. There’s no ironclad evidence I am aware of. However, the presence of the South American sweet potato in Polynesia before European presence has long pointed to some kind of contact (which helped prompt Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki voyage). The recent genetic data on chickens would tend to reinforce that view. If both are true, this implies at least one two-way voyage. IMO, given their incredible sailing feats it wouldn’t surprise me if at least an occasional Polynesian canoe reached South America and made the return voyage.
I don’t know about the Chinese pottery.
The “Book of General Ignorance” (required bathroom reading around these parts) awards the prize for “largest egg in relation to the size of the bird laying it” to the spotted Kiwi (26 percent), although it goes on to say the extinct “Elephant Bird” (Aepyornis maximus) laid an egg about 10 times bigger than an Ostrich egg
Yes, I agree that it would not be terribly surprising if they did. I was just wondering if the consensus had shifted in the last few years. The wikipedia article says the chicken DNA data has been disputed, but the sweet potato issue has been known for a long time, and there isn’t much disputing that.
The fact that it got there isn’t disputed, but how it did still is. Of course, Heyerdahl proposed it arrived via one-way travel via balsa rafts from South America. Apparently there is a recent proposal that it could have arrived on a drifting, unmanned vessel. The chicken evidence would help support the idea of a two-way voyage by Polynesians.
But New Zealanders did do quite a job of eliminating the Moa. Granted they weren’t domesticated but I read somewhere that giant earthen ovens were built to roast the birds. Also, using the giant eggs as water vessels probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
The dispute is about whether or not the DNA is actually closer to polynesian chickens:
In the bit you quoted, I was talking about the sweet potato.
Which bird is most closely related to the sweet potato? 
The turkey is generally the closest, at least near the end of November.
While pastoralists, such as the Tauregs, probably do not often keep chickens, they have no problems trading with settled populations. They probably get a chicken now and then, and eggs make good road food.
The OP is, somewhat surprisingly, not the first person to raise this cosmic question on the interwebs:
At present, his answer appears to be “no”. (Of course, I think he’s investigating only countries that might be devoid of chickens, not possible isolated social groups of non-galliformivores* within a country.)
- (Yes, I am extremely proud of that word. ;))
Antarctica!