The analysis of the 8,000 -year -old teeth has revealed how pigs were domesticated for the first time of the wild boars in what is now the southern China.
The new study, published in it Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesHe is the first to show that pigs were eating cooked food and waste from ancient human houses.
“While most wild boars are naturally aggressive, some are more friendly and less fearful for people, who are the ones who can live with humans,” says principal author Jiajing Wang, assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth College in the United States. “Living with humans gave them easy access to food, so they no longer needed to keep their robust physicists. Over time, their bodies became smaller and their brains also became smaller in approximately one third.”
Traditional domestication studies focus on the skeletal form of ancient animals.
“But this method can be problematic because the reduction in body size probably occurred later in the domestication process,” says Wang. “What probably came first were behavioral changes, such as being less aggressive and more tolerant with humans.”
The new study analyzed the molars of 32 old pigs to see what they were eating throughout their useful life. The teeth were 2 places where humans lived 8,000 years ago in Jingtoushan and Kuahuqiao in the Bajo Yangtze river region in southern China.
A total of 240 microfossil starch granules were found that showed that old pigs ate rice and ñams cooked by humans, as well as your unidentified notches, acorns and wild herbs.
“We can assume that pigs do not cook food for themselves, so they probably received the food from humans, either fed by them and/or human food collecting,” says Wang. “These are plants that were present in the environment at that time and found themselves in human settlements.”
Parasites eggs that grow in the human digestive system were also found in the molar. This indicates that pigs were also celebrating in human feces, or drinking water or eating food on land contaminated by such feces.
“The pigs are known for their habit of eating human waste, so it is additional evidence that these pigs probably lived with humans or had a very close relationship with them,” explains Wang.
“The wild boars were probably attracted to human settlements when people began to establish themselves and began to cultivate their own food,” says Wang. “These settlements created a large amount of waste, and that waste attracts scavengers for food, which in turn encourages selection mechanisms that favor animals willing to live with humans.”
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