Lesser Beasts
Mark Essig
Basic Books, $27.50
If humans have a counterpart in the rest of the animal world, it is surely the pig.
As historian Mark Essig writes in Lesser Beasts, perhaps no other animal’s history more closely mirrors that of humans. From the appearance of semi-tame Sus scrofa living with hunter-gatherers 11,000 years ago in Turkey to the role of swine in the rise and fall of empires, the story of the pig is also the story of modern humans.