Over 3,000 years ago, Israeli had wild boars running through its countryside. Three thoursand years later, they still do, but a different breed.
Domesticated pigs brought from Europe either drove the original boars out, or, more likely, bred them out. Eventually, the semi-domesticated hybrids would return to nature. Israel has had wild European pigs ever since, the International Business Times reported.
Only recently have Israeli scientists uncovered the complex history of its boars and they did so by chance, according to a press release on Monday. Since they mostly resemble other wild boars found in the Middle East, including Egypt and Iran, scientists had little reason to suspect their dubious origins.
The new study, supported by Tel Aviv University's Department of Zoology, initially intended to analyze ancient pig bones in Philistine on the southern coastal plain of Israel and determine how inhabitants used local pig breeds versus ones imported from Europe. When they compared the DNA of current boars to the bone samples, they found that all 25 current-boar samples contained a genetic signature unique to European pigs. Current-boar samples from other Middle Eastern countries, however, almost always had a DNA signature unique to their region, according to the study.
The unexpected finding confirmed that Israel's wild boars are one of a kind among the boars of the Middle East and are descendants of domesticated pigs brought in from Europe over 3,000 years ago.
"Our DNA analysis proves that the wild boars living in Israel today are the descendants of European pigs brought here starting in the Iron Age, around 900 BCE," said one of the study's co-authors, Professor Israel Finkelstein. "Given the concentration of pig bones found at Philistine archaeological sites, the European pigs likely came over in the Philistines' boats."
Though researchers suspect the European domesticated pigs mated with the native wild pigs to create a mixed breed, they still have to perform DNA testing to confirm that theory.
"If the European pigs mated with the local pigs, as we suspect, today's modern wild boars should have some Near Eastern DNA," says Dr. Meirav Meiri, who conducted the laboratory work for the study in a special, highly sterile lab in TAU's Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology. "If the European pigs just out-competed the locals, we'd expect the wild boars to have purely European DNA."
