“Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” is an enigma that has baffled young and old for generations. Actually the Greek philosopherPlutarchdiscussed the question in an essay calledSymposiaaround the year 100 AD And even he was certainly not the first to think about it.
It's a simple question. But if the egg came first, who laid it? Eggs come from chickens. And if the chicken came first, where did it come from? Because chickens come from eggs. So what came first?
Well, you'll be relieved to hear that there's a clear answer to what came before – and the answer lies in the way animals evolved.
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So what came first: the chicken or the egg?
It's pretty safe to say that the egg came first, because if there had been no egg, there would have been no chicken. Being chickensbirds, and we know that birds evolved from itreptile, so we can say that the first bird hatched from an egg laid by a reptile that was very similar, but not quite, to the bird itself.
Of course, this reptile also hatched from an egg, and as we know, reptiles evolved from thatamphibiansThe very first reptile, in turn, was the offspring of an amphibian that was almost, but not quite, a reptile.
In fact, any animal that is multicellular and has sex produces so-called eggs. Although their name means "first animal," protozoa are not animals and do not produce eggs. What exactly the first real animal was is unknown. What we do know is that it lived deep into the Precambrian period about a billion years ago and produced eggs.
