<P> By the end of the 16th century, the well - known question seemed to have been regarded as settled in the Christian world, based on the origin story of the Bible . In describing the creation of animals, it allows for a first chicken that did not come from an egg . However, later enlightenment philosophers began to question this solution . </P> <P> Although the question is typically used metaphorically, evolutionary biology provides literal answers, made possible by the Darwinian principle that species evolve over time, and thus that chickens had ancestors that were not chickens, similar to a view expressed by the Greek philosopher Anaximander when addressing the paradox . </P> <P> If the question refers to eggs in general, the egg came first . The first amniote egg--that is, a hard - shelled egg that could be laid on land, rather than remaining in water like the eggs of fish or amphibians--appeared around 312 million years ago . In contrast, chickens are domesticated descendants of red junglefowl and probably arose little more than eight thousand years ago, at most . </P> <P> If the question refers to chicken eggs specifically, the answer is still the egg, but the explanation is more complicated . The process by which the chicken arose through the interbreeding and domestication of multiple species of wild jungle fowl is poorly understood, and the point at which this evolving organism became a chicken is a somewhat arbitrary distinction . Whatever criteria one chooses, an animal nearly identical to the modern chicken (i.e., a proto - chicken) laid a fertilized egg that had DNA identical to the modern chicken (due to mutations in the mother's ovum, the father's sperm, or the fertilised zygote). Put more simply by Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Which came first: the chicken or the egg? The egg--laid by a bird that was not a chicken ." </P>

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