Cabinet: Your book starts with a distinction between the only two turkey species that survived from prehistoric times—the ocellated turkey and the common turkey. Which one became the domesticated turkey we know today?
Andrew F. Smith: The ocellated turkey thrives only in Honduras, Guatemala, and Southern Mexico—it’s a very narrow range—and despite repeated attempts, it has never been domesticated. The larger group is the common turkey—Meleagris gallopavo—which includes six different varieties in the United States and Mexico and Canada today, and from two of these varieties the domesticated turkey emerged.
Let’s talk about domestication. You note that there’s some archeological evidence of turkey domestication quite early on in Mesoamerica.
The archeological record isn’t good enough to draw any clear conclusions. You look at the bones of wild and domesticated turkeys and they’re almost exactly the same. Now if feathers survive, then you can get some indication of domestication: if they’re white-tipped, the birds most likely were fed a diet of corn, and corn doesn’t grow in the wild—so you know there is some connection between these particular turkeys and humans. If you have eggshells nearby, that can indicate domestication. It looks as if the turkey was domesticated twice—in what is now Mexico and in what is now the American Southwest.
These pre-Columbian domestications occurred in the first few centuries AD. What happens between then and when the Europeans arrive?
We do have archeological evidence of wild turkeys in North America beyond the American Southwest and they go back several thousand years. We know the wild turkey was part of the diet of Mesoamerica and in North America many Indian groups ate turkey. At the same time, some tribes like the Pima, the Papago, the Cheyenne, and the Hopi quite emphatically refused to eat turkeys, though the Hopi considered their eggs a delicacy and turkey bones and feathers were frequently used in religious ceremonies.
So how did the turkey get to Europe?
European explorers had no common way of describing or naming New World plants and animals, so when you’re examining early records of voyages, you’re never exactly sure what is being described. And there’s a linguistic problem with the turkey. In most European languages, it was named after the peafowl. In English, the word turkey itself appears before 1492, but it most likely refers to the Guinea fowl, which originated in West Africa. The peafowl, the Guinea fowl, and the turkey are all very closely related genetically, so it is understandable that they would be confused, but it is very difficult examining the record to determine when the turkey really arrived in Europe. That said, the most likely answer to the question is that the Spanish brought turkeys back to Spain and Italy after Cortés’s invasion of Mexico in 1519.