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Pigs · room 2 of 6 · 10,500 years ago

Becoming domestic

Anatolia and China, the scavengers at the village edge, and what ancient DNA revealed.

The wild boarBecoming domesticPigs in EuropePigs in SpainPigs in the AmericasReality?
About 10,500 years ago

Anatolia: pigs kept before they were tame

biologyhistory

Claim: the first domestic pigs appeared in southeastern Anatolia (today's Turkey). Evidence: at Çayönü Tepesi, pig bones grow slowly smaller over many centuries from about 10,500 years ago, the mark of animals living with people. At the older village of Hallan Çemi, mostly young male pigs were killed, which some archaeologists read as early herd management; others disagree.

Ask: domestication was a slow process, not an event. What evidence in bones would show it happening?

Sources: Ervynck, Dobney, Hongo and Meadow, "Born free? New evidence for the status of Sus scrofa at Neolithic Çayönü Tepesi," Paléorient 27:2 (2001); Larson and Fuller, "The Evolution of Animal Domestication," Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45 (2014)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
About 9,000 years ago

China: a second, separate beginning

biologyhistory

Claim: pigs were domesticated a second time, independently, in China. Evidence: at Jiahu, a farming village in Henan Province, pig teeth and bones from about 9,000 years ago show changes linked to life with people, and DNA confirms that East Asian domestic pigs descend from local wild boar, not from Anatolia.

Ask: if two peoples who never met both tamed the pig, what does that suggest about the animal?

Sources: Cucchi et al., "Early Neolithic pig domestication at Jiahu, Henan Province, China," Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011); Larson and Fuller (2014)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
The commensal pathway

The scavengers at the village edge

biologyhistory

Claim: pigs may have domesticated themselves partway. Evidence: archaeologist Melinda Zeder describes a "commensal pathway": bold wild boar came to eat the waste around early villages, the least fearful bred near people, and over generations humans moved from tolerating them to managing them. Dogs and cats probably came the same way.

Ask: who chose whom? Make the case that the pig, not the farmer, started domestication.

Sources: Melinda A. Zeder, "Pathways to Animal Domestication," in Biodiversity in Agriculture (Cambridge, 2012); Larson and Fuller (2014)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
About 8,500 years ago and after

What ancient DNA revealed

biologyhistory

Claim: Europe's farm pigs carry almost none of the DNA of the first domestic pigs. Evidence: Frantz and colleagues (2019) sequenced ancient pig genomes and found that domestic pigs from the Near East reached Europe with farmers about 8,500 years ago, but within about 3,000 years interbreeding with local wild boar had replaced nearly all of their Near Eastern ancestry, while the pigs stayed domestic.

Ask: if almost all the genes changed, what made the pigs still "domestic"? The way people kept them, or a few key genes?

Sources: Frantz et al., "Ancient pigs reveal a near-complete genomic turnover following their introduction to Europe," PNAS 116:35 (2019)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
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