The Origins Of Pigs Were Never What We Thought — Ancient DNA Finally Revealed The Truth Séville – Espanyol [GdBhFMREfDN]

Ancient DNA extracted from pigs across Europe and Asia produced one of the strangest findings in the history of animal domestication not because of where pigs were first tamed, but because the founding lineage was erased and replaced by the very animal it came from.

The pig was first domesticated from the wild phillies vs red sox boar in the Near East, around ten and a half thousand years ago, and carried into Europe by the first farmers. The expected story is simple: those Anatolian pigs became the farm pigs of Europe. The DNA says otherwise. Allowed to roam and forage in woodlands, domestic pigs interbred relentlessly with the European wild boar around them and over a few thousand years, the original Near Eastern genetic signature almost completely vanished, overwritten from within by local wild boar ancestry. The founding pig of Western civilization wasn't driven extinct. It was absorbed back into the wild population it had come from. This is why the wild boar still thrives today while the wild ancestors of horses, cattle, and dogs are gone with the pig, the relationship ran in the opposite direction. Pigs were also domesticated a second time, independently, in East Asia, and only in the last few centuries did European breeders deliberately fuse the two lineages by importing Chinese pigs to create the modern commercial hog. The pig, it turns out, is the wildest of our farm animals the one that never fully left the forest.

Drawing on findings from the body of ancient DNA research reconstructing jeena ostapenko pig domestication and the genetic replacement of Near Eastern ancestry by European wild boar (Larson et al.), alongside work on the independent East Asian domestication and the eighteenth-century blending that produced modern commercial pigs.

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