Domesticating a wild-animal species is not a simple process. It typically has involved a long history of hunting, followed by efforts to manage wild populations. One method, for example, included periodically setting fires to vegetation to encourage the growth of the plants favored by the species that was targeted to tame.

Young animals could be captured, confined and eventually selectively bred for characteristics that made them more manageable.

If it worked, they would end up with a more or less docile animal that they could ride, milk or slaughter for food.

Domesticated animals played an important part in the development of many Old World cultures, but for various historical and biological reasons, they were not as important for the pre-contact cultures of North America.

Dogs were the only domesticated animal across much of the continent, but the Ancestral Puebloans of the American Southwest also domesticated the turkey about 2,000 years ago.

We've known that the indigenous peoples of the Eastern woodlands hunted wild turkeys, but recent evidence suggests they might have been in the initial stages of independently domesticating the species.

Zoe Morris, a bioarchaeologist working with two other archaeologists and an earth scientist at the University of Western Ontario, studied the chemical composition of turkey bones from archaeological sites in Ontario dating to between A.D. 900 and 1650. Their research is published in the current issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Different plants use different chemical pathways when they extract carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air to build their roots, stems and leaves. Plants that use what’s called the C3 pathway include most trees. And plants that use the C4 pathway include most grasses.

So, when turkeys eat lots of C3 foods, such as nuts from trees, or lots of C4 foods, such as maize, it shows up in the chemistry of their bones.

Morris and her co-authors identified three possible dietary scenarios for turkeys in their study: wild turkeys that ate only C3 foods; wild turkeys that ate mostly C3 foods with "occasional or seasonal" additions of C4/maize; and domesticated turkeys that were kept in pens and fed maize year-round.

The turkeys domesticated by the Ancestral Puebloans fall into that final category. But what about the ancient Ontario birds?

The turkeys from sites in central and southeastern Ontario had a mixed C3/C4 diet. Morris and her co-authors argue that, following the autumn harvest, the Ancestral Ontario Iroquoisans purposely left some maize behind in their agricultural fields to attract turkeys.

"This practice would have ensured the availability of turkeys for food, feasting, ritual and medicine," the researchers wrote.

And it would have benefited the turkeys by giving them access to a rich food source just when they needed to add fat for the coming winter.

Morris and her colleagues have documented "an interaction between wild turkeys and Ontario Iroquoisan people at some sites that is currently unique in the North American archaeological literature."

It suggests that the ancestral Iroquoisans of the lower Great Lakes had initiated a symbiotic relationship with wild turkeys that ultimately might have led toward domestication.

Bradley Lepper is a Curator of Archaeology at the Ohio History Connection.