Scientists at the University of Durham recently published the results of their DNA analysis of pigs suggesting that pigs were domesticated independently at least 7 times throughout human history and in different parts of the world.
Lead researcher Keith Dobney said in a press release,
Many archaeologists have assumed the pig was domesticated in no more than two areas of the world, the Near East and the Far East, but our findings turn this theory on its head. 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.
The first evidence of pig domestication occurs in both Eastern Turkey and China about 9,000 years ago. It was believed that from those two initial domestications that the domesticated pig then spread across the world through trade and immigration.
But the DNA evidence examined by Dobney’s team suggests that, instead, other pockets of human civilization domesticated the pig independently, accounting for the animal’s widespread domestication.
As Greger Larson, who collaborated on the research, put it,
Our data show domestication was not as rare as previously thought and that the question now is not “where were pigs domesticated?”, but rather “where were they not domesticated?” This forces us to reconsider our assumptions about early human history and the beginnings of domestication.
Dobney and Larson’s research was published in the March 11, 2005 edition of Science.
Sources:
Pigs domesticated ‘many times’. The BBC, March 11, 2005.
Pigs force rethink on human history. Press Release, University of Oxford, March 11, 2005.