Black pig in Sapa, Vietnam. Credit: bloodua / iStock / Getty Images Plus.
Analysis of 8,000-year-old teeth has revealed how pigs were first domesticated from wild boars in what is today South China.
The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show that pigs were eating the cooked foods and waste from ancient human homes.
Examples of pig molar teeth specimens analysed for the study. Credit: Jiajing Wang.
“While most wild boars are naturally aggressive, some are more friendly and less afraid of people, which are the ones that may live alongside humans,” says lead author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College in the US. “Living with humans gave them easy access to food, so they no longer needed to maintain their robust physiques. Over time, their bodies became smaller, and their brains also became smaller by about one-third.”
“But this method can be problematic because the reduction in body size likely occurred later in the domestication process,” says Wang. “What probably came first were behavioural changes, like becoming less aggressive and more tolerant of humans.”
The new study looked at the molars of 32 ancient pigs to see what they were eating over their lifespan. The teeth were from 2 sites where humans lived 8,000 years ago at Jingtoushan and Kuahuqiao in the Lower Yangtze River region of South China
