By Bruce Bower
People initially bred wild boars into domesticated pigs in at least seven different parts of Asia and Europe, a new genetic study suggests. The finding counters the widely held view that pigs were domesticated in only two regions, located in what’s now Turkey and China, starting around 9,000 years ago.
The new genetic data indicate that the know-how to domesticate wild boars spread rapidly across much of the world, an international team concludes in the March 11 Science. The data also make it unlikely that farmers migrating out of one or two areas brought pigs with them to new locales, the researchers contend.