A mouse, a cat, and a chicken walked into a Neolithic farm ...

AVIAN (AND FAUNAL) ARCHAEOLOGY: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Silk Road? A few thousand years ago, somewhere in Southeast Asia, chickens moved in with us. And then we noticed that they were really good and so were their eggs (Ruth Schuster, Times of Israel). Good as in good to eat. And there's this:

How did we come to embrace the chicken? According to Spengler, Peters and the team, the chicken appeared in the central Thai archaeological record together with the appearance of rice and millet cultivation.

"The production and storage of these cereals may have acted as a magnet, thus initiating the chicken domestication process," they say.

What a coincidence. The house mouse also seems to have appeared in human habitats more or less simultaneously with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, closely followed by the cat. It's become fashionable to say cats "domesticated us" though they didn't selectively breed us, as far as we know. They moved in with us because they wanted to eat the rodents congregating to share our crops and crumbs, just like the chicken would several thousand years later – apparently.

De haan, de kat en het muisje

As for ancient Judaism:

The Israeli archaeological record also features the odd eggshell, including in Jerusalem from 2,600 years ago and a whole egg from 1,000 years ago, which survived the ages intact only to be broken by accident in the lab.

For those two eggshells, see here and here. For more on the domestication of chickens in ancient Israel (Idumea?), see here.

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