Chickens, like all animals on Earth, evolved from other species. The first chicken (regardless of what you define as constituting a chicken, there had to be a first one) was hatched from its egg (thus, a chicken egg), which was laid by a non-chicken (or perhaps more accurately a pre-chicken), after having mated with another non-chicken (pre-chicken). The combined DNA of the parent non-chickens produced the first chicken's egg, from which hatched the first chicken.

Despite the widely used parable that there is a paradox somewhere in this history, there isn't one. The egg came first.

Complex animals evolved from simper life forms, and simpler life forms typically multiply without complex structures like eggs. So it is likely that the first animal to lay an egg did not actually hatch from an egg itself, so in that regard the first egg-laying animal came before the egg.

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