What came first, the chicken or the egg? Scientists finally crack the question that has baffled civilisation

We know eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs, but the question of which comes first has been unanswerable — until now, it seems.

For, after centuries of debate, scientists claim to have cracked the ancient riddle. And the solution lies in the distant past, they say — because the tools to create eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens even appeared.

A team from Geneva University in Switzerland analysed the remains of one of Earth’s earliest lifeforms, a single-celled species called Chromosphaera perkinsii which existed more than a billion years ago and was discovered in 2017 in sediments in Hawaii.

They found once the cells reach maximum size, they divide into multi-cellular structures bearing striking similarities to animal embryos. The discovery suggests the geneticprogrammes behind the process by which a fertilised egg becomes an embryo were around before animal life emerged around 800 million years ago.

Nature, therefore, would have possessed the genetic tools to “create eggs” long before it “invented chickens” 10,000 years ago, they explained. Omaya

Dudin, who worked on the study published in Nature, said: “Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behaviour shows that multicellular coordination... [is] already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared.”

Marine Olivetta, first author of the study, said: “It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years.”

Previous research suggests hard-shelled eggs, like those laid by chickens, did not emerge until 300 million years ago. Chickens are descended from red junglefowl, thought to have been domesticated by early humans because of their ability to lay eggs regularly in comparison with other birds.

The chicken-or-the-egg question was posed by Greek philosopher Plutarch in his essay The Symposiacs, written in the first century. It is an example of a ‘causality’ dilemma in which it is unclear which of two events should be thought of as the “cause” and which the “effect”.

Although seemingly trivial, it was a metaphor for a much bigger question of whether the world had a beginning.

The question has been the cause of many a heated argument, including a case earlier this year when a man in Indonesia allegedly stabbed his friend to death over it. It was unclear which side of the argument each man was on.

© Daily Mail