Wild boarFLICKR, ANDY HAYPig domestication has typically been considered an isolated process in Europe and Asia, during which farmers took animals with desirable traits from the herd and selectively bred them to create lineages in each region. But a study published in Nature Genetics this week (August 31) has shown that Europe’s domestic pigs often interbred with wild populations.
“What our results really show is that over the years, there has been a lot of exchange with wild populations present at many different occasions,” study coauthor Martien Groenen, a geneticist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told The Verge.
Groenen and an international team of researchers examined 103 whole genomes from European wild boars and European domestic breeds, as well as samples from wild boar and domestic pig in Asia. The researchers created models for a range of scenarios to explain the similarities and differences among the genomes, eventually arriving at the most likely: pigs were not isolated from their wild counterparts during or after domestication, resulting in a genetic complex of different wild boar populations.
“We see this massive mosaic, with gene flow ...
