Long before anyone asked which came first, the world already had eggs. Hard shelled eggs appeared around 312 million years ago, at a time when early reptiles were just starting to spread across the land. These early creatures needed a way to protect their young outside the water, and the egg became their perfect solution. Over millions of years, different animals kept laying eggs, shaping life in all kinds of environments.
Chickens, on the other hand, are very new in the timeline of life. They trace their roots to the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia, a wild bird that humans began domesticating roughly 8000 years ago. Little by little, people selected birds with traits they liked, and these choices slowly turned junglefowl into the chickens we know today. This means the bird that laid the first true chicken egg was not a chicken yet but a bird very close to becoming one through tiny genetic changes.
So when people ask the old question of which came first, science makes the answer pretty clear. Eggs existed for hundreds of millions of years before the first chicken ever walked the earth. The classic riddle gets settled by evolution itself, showing how long nature has been experimenting with life and how chickens are only the latest chapter in an ancient story.
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