What Came First, Chicken Or Egg

What Came First

What came first, the chicken or the egg? It is an old question, worn smooth by centuries of mouths repeating it, yet it still sits in the hand like a stone you cannot throw away. I have carried it with me since childhood. It followed me through fields, through classrooms, through quiet kitchens where steam rose from cups and the clock ticked like a patient witness.

As a girl, I thought the answer must be simple. Surely one had to begin the other. Surely something stood at the very start and said, I am first. I remember watching hens in a neighbour’s yard, their feathers puffed, their heads sharp and watchful. They scratched at the earth as if they were searching for secrets buried beneath the soil. Each egg they laid felt like a small miracle, pale and perfect, warm from the body. I would hold one carefully and think, this is the beginning of something.

But then I would look at the hen and think, no, you are the beginning.

Years passed, and the question deepened. It stopped being about feathers and shells. It became about origins. About mothers and daughters. About the way one life folds into another without clear edges. My own mother once told me that when she held me for the first time, she felt as if she were meeting someone she had always known. How can something be new and familiar at once? Which came first, the knowing or the child?

Scientists will tell you about evolution, about tiny changes over thousands upon thousands of years. They will say that something almost a chicken laid an egg, and inside that egg was the first true chicken. It sounds neat when spoken aloud. It sounds finished. The egg came first, they say, because the change happened in the egg.

Yet even that answer feels like a doorway leading to another question. What came before the almost chicken? And before that? We follow the line back and back until it disappears into a haze so thick we cannot see through it. At some point, the question stops being about proof and starts being about wonder.

I have come to think that perhaps the question is not asking for an answer at all. Perhaps it is asking us to notice the circle. The way life moves without sharp corners. The way beginnings and endings lean into each other until they are indistinguishable. The hen carries the egg. The egg carries the hen. Each is both cause and consequence.

There is something comforting in that. We do not always need a single starting point. Not everything stands alone. Some things exist because of a long chain of quiet happenings, each one necessary, each one incomplete without the other.

When I crack an egg into a bowl now, I pause for a second. I look at the golden centre, held in clear white, and I think of all the hens before it. I think of the first bird that was almost what we now call a chicken. I think of the endless turning of time, of wings beating long before any of us were here to ask questions.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg?

If you want the scientific reply, it is the egg. If you want the deeper truth, it is the circle. Life does not begin in a straight line. It begins in a loop, in a returning, in a quiet promise that something will always follow something else. And perhaps that is enough. So please tell what do you think Dear Reader? 🐣 🐓

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