The egg is a product from the original creation and that is the chicken. God created the original specious of birds and with evolution became to fit the time and environment and domesticated for human, and the rest is history.

Eggs come from chickens and chickens come from eggs: that’s the basis of this ancient riddle. But eggs – which are just female sex cells – evolved more than a billion years ago, whereas chickens have been around for just 10,000 years. So the riddle is easily solved or is it?

Taken at face value, there is no doubt that the egg came before the chicken. We tend to think of eggs as the shelled orbs laid by birds from which their chicks hatch – unless we eat them first. But all sexually reproducing species make eggs (the specialized female sex cells). That’s 99.99 per cent of all eukaryotic life – meaning organisms that have cells with a nucleus, so all animal and plants , and everything but the simplest life forms.

As for chickens, they came into being much later. They are domesticated animals, so evolved as the result of humans purposefully selecting the least aggressive wild birds and letting them breed. This seems to have happened in several places independently, starting around 120,000 years ago . 

The wild ancestor of chickens is generally agreed to be a tropical bird still living in the forests of Southeast Asia called the red junglefowl – with other junglefowl species possibly adding to the genetic mix. From these origins, humans have  carried chicken’s around the world .over the past two millennia or more.

So, eggs dramatically predate chickens. But to be fair to the spirit of the riddle, we should also consider whether a chicken’s egg predates a chicken. As humans consistently chose the tamest red junglefowls and bred them together, the genetic makeup of the resulting birds will have shifted. At some stage during this domestication process the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) evolved into a new subspecies, Gallus gallus domesticus, AKA the chicken. The problem is people always forget the intervention of higher power as God planed all that to serve human in this earth.

In practice, it is impossible to pinpoint the moment when this happened. But in theory, at some point two junglefowl bred and their offspring was genetically different enough from the species of its parents to be classified as a chicken. This chicken would have developed within a junglefowl egg and only produced the very first chicken’s egg on reaching maturity. Looked at this way, the chicken came first.