How Did Wild Pigs Become Domestic?

A field full of crops and a pen full of pigs are classic images of the farm. As it turns out, the farm pig is almost as old as farming itself. Humans first domesticated wild boar around 7000 B.C. during the Neolithic period, when humans first began farming.

  1. Pigs and Boars

    • The pig is a domesticated wild boar. Pigs and boars share the same scientific name, sus scrofa, though some call the domesticated pig sus domesticus, to distinguish it from the wild boar. Pigs live wherever humans keeps them. Wild boar tend to inhabit moist oak forests and shrublands. Pigs that escape into the wild are called feral pigs.

    From Boar to Pig

    • The domestication of the wild boar may have started as a result of less timid boars looking for food in human settlements, rather than as a project of human innovation. Humans feeding the less aggressive boars inadvertently helped the more human-friendly boars thrive. Eventually, humans would begin deliberately breeding for traits desirable in domestic livestock.

    First Domestication

    • Unlike the horse, which was tamed in the steppe region of what is now Russia and spread throughout the world as a domesticated animal, the pig was domesticated in several parts of the world at different times. The first pig domestications likely happened in the Middle East, India or North Africa.

    Exporting and New Domestication

    • Eastern domesticated pigs began arriving in Europe around 4000 B.C. DNA evidence shows that, rather than only continuing to breed the domesticated pigs, Europeans also began domesticating their native boar, creating new populations of domestic pigs. Many new breeds of pig have been bred since it was first domesticated.