Current views on Sus phylogeography and pig domestication as seen through modern mtDNA studies
The history of pig domestication is also the history of the beginnings of Eurasian agricultural civilization. Wild boar were an important hunted resource for many millennia before the domestication process significantly altered this relationship between pigs and humans. The end result of this process (involving not just pigs but all other farm animals and pets) has led not only to the development of a staggering number of breeds and variations of what were once solely wild animals, but also to the intensification of the relationship between human beings and domestic animals, to the point of near total dependence of each upon the other. By investigating when, where, and how many times pigs (and other animals) were domesticated, we not only gain an insight into the process of domestication, itself, but also (by extension) a deeper understanding of human history, evolutionary biology, biogeography, and a host of other disciplines. The beginnings of pig management and domestication probably began sometime between the 10th to 8th millennium BP. In western Eurasia, the earliest archaeological evidence for pig domestication comes from a number of sites in Eastern and central Anatolia: Çayönü Tepesi (Ervynck et al. 2001), Hallan Çemi (Redding & Rosenberg 1998; Redding 2005), and Gürcütepe (Peters et al. 2005). At Çayönü Tepesi, a unique 2,000-year stratigraphic sequence, spanning the 9th to 7th millennia BP, has provided perhaps one of the best opportunities to observe the actual process of domestication for pigs. Thus, biometrical and age-at-death data led Ervynck et al. (2001) to postulate several shifts in the intensity of pig–human relationships, not necessarily directly driven by humans in its initial stages. Active involvement of humans in this process, it was argued, took place much later. However the process is specifically defined, the evidence from Çayönü Tepesi clearly reflects an intensification of the relationship between people and pigs over two millennia, and points to eastern Turkey as a centre of early pig domestication. Unfortunately, most early archaeological sites do not possess such long, continuous, or reliably dated occupation sequences, which has made the identification of other centres of animal domestication difficult at best.