Pig domestication updated

Vavilov was correct when he said that pigs were independently domesticated in China and in the Near East. But the real story is even more complicated than that. In Vavilov’s day, the idea was that pigs had been domesticated from wild boar in the Near East and then carried with them by Neolithic farmers as they spread westwards across Europe. Then a study of DNA from nearly 700 pigs, ancient and modern, wild and domesticated, put paid to that idea. ^[1] Instead of farm pigs beings most closely related to one another, as one might expect if they were descended from a single domestication (or two, allowing for a distinct event in China) the farm pigs were most closely related to the wild boar of the surrounding area.

As Keith Dobney, one of the study leaders, commented in 2005:

Our study shows that domestication also occurred independently in central Europe, Italy, Northern India, South East Asia and maybe even Island South East Asia. The spread of farming into these areas during the Neolithic seems to have kick-started local independent domestication of wild boar.

However, later work by the same group of scientists complicated the picture still further. ^[2] Looking at 545 samples of pig and boar specimens from across western Eurasia showed that domesticated pigs from the Near East were definitely present in Europe, and had reached Paris by about 6000 years ago. Local boar too had been domesticated by this time, possibly encouraged by imitation. Those local domesticates then quickly replaced the breeds from the Near East, perhaps because they were already adapted to local conditions.

The net result is that, at least before the global spread of industrial super-pigs, surviving breeds of local pigs trace their ancestry to wild boar in the same region, not just in China and the Near East, but in five other centres too.

I like to think Vavilov would be thrilled at the new insights being provided by the marriage of molecular biology and archaeology.

Notes:

1. The paper, in Science, is behind a paywall. [↩]
2. G. Larson, U. Albarella, K. Dobney, P. Rowley-Conwy, J. Schibler, A. Tresset, J.-D. Vigne, C. J. Edwards, A. Schlumbaum, A. Dinu, A. Balacsescu, G. Dolman, A. Tagliacozzo, N. Manaseryan, P. Miracle, L. Van Wijngaarden-Bakker, M. Masseti, D. G. Bradley, A. Cooper (2007). Ancient DNA, pig domestication, and the spread of the Neolithic into Europe Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (39), 15276-15281 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0703411104 [↩]

Tagged as: Domestication, Pigs