Pigs were first domesticated from wild boars in the Near East and taken to Europe by early farmers, but a new genetic study shows that European farmers then domesticated local boars, which eventually supplanted the foreign animals.
Migrating farmers then completed the circle, taking the European animals to the Near East, where they supplanted the first domesticates, according to a report Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Today, descendants of those first Near Eastern pigs exist only in a few, isolated feral herds on islands including Cyprus and Corsica, France.
The findings provide support for the idea that the introduction of farming to Europe involved a migration of farmers from the Near East, taking their domestic plants, animals and distinctive pottery with them. Many researchers have argued that farming was brought to Europe through an exchange of culture that involved little physical movement, but these findings seem to make that scenario much less likely.
The pig study also shows clear evidence of two migration pathways from the Near East. Researchers have long debated which dominated; now it appears both were used.
"The truth lies in a much more complex, much more nuanced picture," said archeologist Melinda A. Zeder of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the research. "This shows that people were able to evaluate new technologies and adapt them to their own use. It gives ancient people a lot more credit."
Archeologists have established that agriculture began about 10,000 years ago in the Near East. It spread rapidly west into and across Europe over the next 4,000 years, arriving in Britain about 4000 BC.
Since no sheep or goats were indigenous to Europe, those were clearly brought to the continent after domestication elsewhere. Cows were indigenous, but a variety of evidence has shown that they were displaced by animals that were probably first domesticated in the Near East.
Pigs have a different history. Previous results by archeologist Greger Larson of Britain's Durham University have shown that the animals were independently domesticated at as many as nine sites around the world. Their relatively small size and portability enabled humans to take them on migrations, making the animals an excellent proxy for tracing human movements.
In the current study, Larson and his colleagues studied mitochondrial DNA from 323 modern and 221 ancient pig specimens.
