European hunter-gatherers began farming pigs around 4600 BC, according to an international team of researchers led by Dr Ben Krause-Kyora from the Christian-Albrechts University in Germany.
Around 4600 BC prehistoric Europeans acquired pigs whose coat might have looked similar to that of this modern-day Bentheimer pig (Graduate School Human Development in Landscapes).
The spread of plants and animals throughout Europe between 6000 and 4000 BC involved a complex interplay between indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and incoming Neolithic farmers but the scale of the interaction and the extent to which hunter-gatherers took ideas from their neighbors remains hotly debated. Previous evidence about the ownership of domestic animals by hunter-gatherers has so far been circumstantial.
“Mesolithic hunter-gatherers definitely had dogs, but they did not practice agriculture and did not have pigs, sheep, goats, or cows, all of which were introduced to Europe with incoming farmers about 6000 BC. Having people who practiced a very different survival strategy nearby must have been odd, and we know now that the hunter-gathers possessed some of the farmers’ domesticated pigs,” Dr Krause-Kyora said.
The scientists analyzed the ancient DNA from the bones and teeth of 63 pigs from Northern Germany which showed that the hunter-gatherers acquired domestic pigs of varying size and coat color that had both Near Eastern and European ancestry. The findings appear in the journal Nature Communications.
It is not yet known whether the hunter-gatherers received the pigs via trade or exchange, or by hunting and capturing escaped animals. However, the domestic pigs had different colored and spotted coats that would have seemed strange and exotic to the hunter-gatherers and may have attracted them to the pigs.
“Humans love novelty, and though hunter-gatherers exploited wild boar, it would have been hard not to be fascinated by the strange-looking spotted pigs owned by farmers living nearby. It should come as no surprise that the hunter-gatherers acquired some eventually, but this study shows that they did very soon after the domestic pigs arrived in northern Europe,” said study co-author Dr Greger Larson of Durham University.
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Bibliographic information: Ben Krause-Kyora et al. 2013. Use of domesticated pigs by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northwestern Europe. Nature Communications 4, article number: 2348; doi: 10.1038/ncomms3348
