Pigs
Wild boar are domesticated in Anatolia and China, and adapt to living off human waste.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Pigs are domesticated independently in the Near East around 8000 BCE and in China shortly after. Unlike ruminants they compete with people for food, but they convert scraps and refuse efficiently, breed fast and produce large litters — they suit settled villages rather than mobile herders. That association with settlement, and with refuse, may lie behind the later dietary prohibitions in parts of the Near East.