Research by archaeologists from Chinese and US institutes suggests that pigs were already domesticated in southern China around 8,000 years ago.
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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.
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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.