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Pigs may have been domesticated in China as early as Neolithic era: study
Research by archaeologists from Chinese and US institutes suggests that pigs were already domesticated in southern China around 8,000 years ago.
The team, which included researchers from Dartmouth College and the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, analysed two early Neolithic sites in the province's Yangtze Delta region.
The study – published on June 9 in the prestigious international journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – 'is the first to find that pigs were eating humans' cooked foods and waste', according to a Dartmouth College press release.
The findings suggested the domestication process of Sus scrofa – the wild boar – occurred alongside the development of rice cultivation and sedentary lifestyles in ancient society around 8,000 years ago in the southern region of China, the archaeologists said.
The conventional view – as outlined, for instance, in a 2017 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, part of the Nature Portfolio – is that pigs were first domesticated in the Near East – part of what is now called the Middle East.
According to the 2017 study, pigs were introduced to northern Europe from the region now called the Middle East around 4500 BC, a development that later facilitated the domestication of European wild boars.
The domestication of pigs has had profound socioeconomic and ecological consequences throughout human history, but how did they evolve from the large, aggressive wild boar that lives independently in forests, rooting the undergrowth for food?
Domestic pigs are not only friendlier – making them safer for humans to live with – they also have smaller heads and mouths, as well as shorter teeth, than their wild counterparts.
While southern China has long been considered another possible location for the domestic pig's origin, how to determine the precise timing and nature of the process has remained a challenging scientific problem.
The research team, led by Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College, addressed the issue by examining sites from a period associated with the domestication of livestock as humans began the transition from foraging to farming.
The team collected the molar teeth of 32 pig specimens from Jingtoushan and Kuahuqiao – Neolithic sites in the Lower Yangtze River region dating to at least 8,000 years ago – in a bid to understand the animals' dietary habits over their lifespans.
Microfossil analysis of the teeth revealed 240 starch granules, which are indicators of plant material, and showed that the pigs had eaten cooked foods – rice and yams – as well as other plants, including acorns and wild grasses.
The researchers also found yellow-brown, ball-shaped eggs in the dental calculus consistent with a parasite that matures inside the human digestive system. They deduced that the pigs must have been consuming food or water contaminated by human faeces.
Wang, the study's lead author, said in a news release that wild boars were probably attracted to human settlements as people started to settle down and grow their own food.
'These settlements created a large amount of waste, and that waste attracted scavengers for food, which in turn fostered selection mechanisms that favoured animals willing to live alongside humans,' he said.
Thousands of years later, pork has become an integral part of daily life for China's population of more than 1.4 billion.
China is the world's largest producer, consumer and importer of pork, producing 57.06 million tonnes of the meat in 2024. At the same time, about half of all pork consumed worldwide was consumed by China.
- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
