Have a good Columbus day weekend y'all to our south for Canadians grab a drumstick and have a good feast.
The truth about turkeys
Appropriately for the Americas – which were mistaken for a totally different continent by the Europeans who encountered them – turkeys are an unintended symbol of major confusion.
If you’re wondering why they’re named after a country that is nowhere near their actual home, this explanation from NPR gives the rather wonky backstory. It seems when the birds were first imported to England, it was via merchants operating out of Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. Average folks buying it for a meal would have associated it more with the Turks rather than the little-known New World, and it stuck.
Image Source.
The other explanation: Explorers may have mistaken it for a version of a Guinea fowl from West Africa … often called Turkey coqs due to the Turkish merchants who traded it.
It’s an odd naming fate for a bird so deeply rooted in the Americas. Your thanksgiving meal has an evolutionary history of 11 million years (according to this source).
It was domesticated in Mexico as early as 800 BC and in the southwestern U.S. by 200 BC (according to Discovery).
Aside from food, the Maya, Aztecs and other peoples prized them for their plumage and as part of religious rites, as did some of the peoples in North America.
Image Source.
Some pre-contact U.S. peoples actually encouraged their numbers as a side-effect of the controlled forest burning used to make meadowlands for game.
