OREANDA-NEWS Archaeological evidence showed that pigs were domesticated in the Middle East, which means that modern pigs should resemble a Middle Eastern boar. Instead, the genetic signatures of modern European domestic pigs resemble European boars. A study Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how this happened. Researchers have sequenced DNA signatures of more than 2,000 ancient pigs, including the genomes of 63 archaeological pigs collected in the Middle East and Europe over the past 10,000 years. 

The results showed that the first pigs that arrived in Europe with farmers 8,000 years ago were of obvious Middle Eastern genetic origin. However, over the next three thousand years, ancient domestic pigs interbreed with European wild boars to such an extent that they lost almost all of their Middle Eastern origin. A low level of Middle Eastern pedigree potentially remained in the genome of modern European domestic pigs, hence their black and black and white spotted coat colors. 

A higher level of Middle Eastern pedigree was maintained in pig populations on the Mediterranean islands; apparently, these populations experienced a lower gene flow from European wild boar than pigs on the continent. Now that the team has put a chronology of the genomic history of pigs in Western Eurasia together, the next step in the study will be to accurately identify the few genes in the genome of modern European domestic pigs that have retained their original Middle Eastern pedigree.