Figure 3.1. Stone pillar from Göbekli Tepe (Enclosure C) decorated with bas-relief image of a male wild boar and other animals.
In the beginning, the Near East was devoid of both pigs and humans. The genus Sus evolved in Southeast Asia and arrived in the Near East around 1 million years ago.1 Humans came from the other direction. The genus Homo evolved in Africa around 2.5 million years ago, and by 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus had successfully colonized the Near East.2 Because these and other species of Homo made stone tools, the period from 2.5 million to 200,000 years ago is known as the Lower Paleolithic (literally “old stone” age). It corresponds to a geological epoch, the Pleistocene, characterized by cooler temperatures across the globe.
By the Middle Paleolithic (200,000–40,000 years ago), two hominin species had replaced Homo erectus in the Near East: Neanderthals (Homo. neanderthalensis) and our ancestors, anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens). The early career of our species in the Near East was not promising. Throughout the Middle Paleolithic, Neanderthals were the dominant hominin and the small Near Eastern populations of Homo sapiens repeatedly went extinct. Something changed around 60-50,000 years ago. Modern humans began to make more complex stone tools, developed elaborate and diverse ritual behaviors, and displayed a near-universal tendency to manipulate their environments—they became “the ultimate ecosystem engineers.”3 These traits led to larger, more stable, and more successful populations that drove Neanderthals to extinction.
Modern humans lived as hunter-gatherers from their earliest arrival in the Near East until the end of the Epipaleolithic period around 9700 BC. As technological advances and environmental impacts accumulated, human populations developed new ways of exploiting the world around them. Populations increased and, in some places, hunter-gatherers adopted a more sedentary way of life, especially during the Natufian period (12,500–9700 BC). Domestic dogs—perhaps first domesticated in Europe—had appeared in the Near East by 11,000 BC.4 The climate was also changing: the cold and dry climate gave way to a wet and warm period from 12,500 BC to 10,900 BC, during which human populations thrived. It briefly returned to cold and dry conditions in the Younger Dryas (10,900–9700 BC), forcing the larger and more environmentally manipulative societies to change their subsistence practices.5
The amelioration of the climate, the easing of the Younger Dryas into the warmer and more stable Holocene, set the stage for the Neolithic (9700–5200 BC). People settled into permanent villages and began to make houses out of mudbrick. While they continued to harvest local plants and hunt animals as their ancestors had done, they did so more intensively. Over time, the cumulative effects of these types of activities around sedentary villages led to the selection of unique mutations in some populations of plants and animals—that is, domestication. Beginning around 8500 BC, populations of cereals, like barley and wheat, lost their seed-shattering dispersal mechanisms and became domestic. Shortly thereafter, animals from a select group of species, including Sus scrofa, developed the characteristics of the “domestication syndrome.” By 7500 BC, the list of domesticates included barley, wheat, chickpeas, peas, lentils, fava beans, flax, vetch, sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. A farming economy had been established. It would become the way for most people living in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Levant.
The earliest interactions between Homo and Sus were of reluctant hunters encountering ferocious prey. Homo erectus pursued Sus strozzi and, later, Sus scrofa. However, despite the fact that Homo and Sus populations inhabited similar ecosystems, evidence for Lower Paleolithic wild boar hunting is scarce. Lower Paleolithic faunal data consistently show that Sus remains make up a small proportion (usually less than 1 percent) of the recovered medium and large mammal bones.6
The big-brained humans of the Middle Paleolithic Near East, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, were better equipped to hunt and process the carcasses of various species of animals. Nevertheless, they continued to avoid wild boar, generally preferring to go after fallow deer, roe deer, wild goats, and gazelle, as well as other big mammals like horses, onagers, and camels.7 Across the Near East, wild boar remains consistently make up only about 1–5 percent of medium and large mammal bones from Middle Paleolithic sites.8 However, people did occasionally work wild boar into their burial ceremonies and other rituals. Excavators at Skhul V in Israel, for example, uncovered a human skeleton holding a wild boar jaw.9
At only one site is there evidence that Neanderthals or anatomically modern humans enjoyed more frequent success at boar hunting in the Middle Paleolithic: Üçağızlı II Cave in southern Turkey. Wild boar make up around 9 percent of the medium and large mammal remains found there. This atypical pattern likely reflects the unique geography of the site, which lies near several steep-walled canyons. By positioning themselves at key locations, even a small number of Middle Paleolithic hunters armed with thrusting spears and rocks would have been able to target, trap, and dispatch wild boar and other prey with relative ease.10
With the exception of their boar hunting at Üçağızlı II Cave, ancient humans seem to have avoided wild boar. The reason for this is probably obvious to anyone who has encountered these animals in the wild: they are fast and, when frightened, can become aggressive. Once cornered, wild boar are apt to turn and charge their predators, using their razor-sharp tusks and massive head like a spiked club. Killing these animals is also no easy task. Wild boar are armored by tough hides and dense, heavy skulls that can absorb direct blows. Older boars develop a layer of hard cartilage over their rib cages. This “shield,” as modern hunters call it, can deflect or outright stop arrows and even bullets.
The ferocity of wild boar makes for dramatic hunts. Without the aid of projectile weapons or traps, the final confrontation is a bloody struggle akin to hand-to-hand combat between two warriors. For that reason, wild boar have long symbolized masculinity throughout Eurasia.11 The Odyssey provides perhaps the most vivid description of such an encounter, when a young Odysseus, impetuous and pugnacious, rushes to attack a boar:
Here, as the hunters closed in for the kill,
crowding the hounds, the tramp of men and dogs
came drumming round the boar—he crashed from his lair,
his razor back bristling, his eyes flashing fire
and charging up to the hunt he stopped, at bay—
and Odysseus rushed him first,
shaking his long spear in a sturdy hand,
wild to strike but the boar struck faster,
lunging in on the slant, a tusk thrusting up
over the boy’s knee, gouging a deep strip of flesh
but it never hit the bone—
Odysseus thrust and struck
stabbing the beast’s right shoulder—
A glint of bronze—
the point ripped clean through, and down in the dust he dropped,
grunting out his breath as his life winged away.12
The danger of wild boar explains their relative infrequency in Lower and Middle Paleolithic diets. Odysseus’s thrilling battle with the boar probably mirrored the nightmarish experiences of more than a few ancient hunter-gatherers. Although direct evidence for hunts gone south is hard to come by, one can imagine that more than a few of the hunters who decided to pursue wild boar ended up mauled or killed. The risk posed to Lower and Middle Paleolithic hunters, who possessed only thrusting spears, effectively prevented suid hunting on a large scale when there were other, less dangerous options available.13
Homo sapiens in the Upper Paleolithic, beginning a little over 40,000 years ago, made an impressive number of technological advancements. They developed blade and bladelet lithic production techniques used bone and antler as raw materials, fashioned grinding stones for processing other plants, and deployed projectile weapons for the first time.14 These technological innovations allowed modern humans to exploit their environments with greater efficacy. For example, they could hunt difficult-to-catch animals, such as hares, and more frequently target prime-aged big game mammals, which are quicker and more difficult to kill but provide larger packages of fat-rich meat.
In theory, these technological changes also made wild boar hunting more practical. Projectile weapons allowed hunters to strike their prey from a safe distance. The use of nets and snares, meanwhile, made it possible for them to deliver a killing blow without risking death or injury.15 Nevertheless, equids, gazelle, deer, and wild goats and sheep remained the major sources of meat.16 Sus bones rarely exceed 5 percent of the recovered medium and large mammal remains at Upper Paleolithic sites.17
Subtle changes in boar-hunting strategies may have been taking place. Although the numbers of wild boar bones recovered from archaeological sites do not change much, the ages of the animals killed do. During the Upper Paleolithic, hunters appear to have targeted younger (and therefore smaller) animals more frequently. They may have even sought out on occasion farrowing sows and their litters.18 This was a safer method of procuring meat that marked an important milestone in human-suid relations.
Wild boar hunting continued to evolve through the Epipaleolithic. The early phases of the Epipaleolithic saw little change in its popularity, despite transformations in other food procurement strategies. At the site of Ohalo II, located on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, hunter-gatherers intensively collected and possibly even stored and cultivated wild cereals by 21,000 BC.19 However, Ohalo II’s inhabitants focused primarily on gazelle and deer for their meat. They ate almost no pork, despite attraction of wild boar to lacustrine environments.20 Similarly, at other sites across the Near East, Sus scrofa continued to comprise less than 5 percent of the medium and large mammals.21
The first sign of change occurred in the Natufian period, ca. 12,500–9700 BC. The Natufian is often portrayed—correctly or not—as the harbinger of agriculture, a sort of proto-Neolithic that was interrupted by the Younger Dryas climate downturn at 10,900 BC.22 Natufian hunter-gatherers developed improved methods for hunting and trapping small game and ungulates. They also left behind stone sickle blades, evidence of wild cereal harvesting.23 Driving, or driven by, these alterations to the subsistence economy was an increase in human populations. In some places, people settled down into more or less permanently occupied base camps. Rituals grew more elaborate, especially those surrounding burials.24
In terms of meat procurement, people living at Natufian settlements focused heavily, and in some places almost exclusively, on gazelle hunting.25 But one Natufian site contrasts with this pattern: ‘Ain Mallaha, located in northern Israel. There, wild boar account for around 20 percent of the medium and large mammal bones in the later phases of the site’s occupation, dating to the 11th millennium BC. The wild boar bones include the remains of fetal individuals and a relatively high proportion of animals less than three years old. Taken as a whole, this evidence is suggestive of an intensive hunting strategy in which wild boar were increasingly relied on for meat and were targeted in such a way as to minimize the risks to the hunter.26
A number of factors, in combination or by themselves, might have made boar hunting attractive to the Natufian inhabitants of ‘Ain Mallaha. First, ‘Ain Mallaha was located in a marshy area near the now-drained Lake Hula, a place likely to attract and sustain sizable populations of wild boar. Second, the site of ‘Ain Mallaha was a more or less permanent base camp for several Natufian hunter-gatherer families.27 The presence of a sedentary human occupation, and especially the organic waste that such groups deposit, may have attracted wild boar to the settlement, pulling them into closer orbit with humans.
A third factor may also explain the unexpectedly high proportion of wild boar bones in the assemblage. ‘Ain Mallaha is well known for containing some of the earliest evidence for domestic dogs in the Near East, including the burial of a puppy alongside an adult human.28 Dogs, historically and today, are vital features of boar hunts. Packs of hounds can chase and track wild boar through forest undergrowth much better than any human hunter. Once cornered, dogs keep the boar at bay until the hunter can dispatch it. And if the boar charges, it is more likely to gore a canine than a human. There is no doubt that wild boar hunting would have become a more feasible and less dangerous option once dogs were introduced. Although it remains difficult to find direct evidence for the use of dogs as hunting animals in the archaeological record, the fact that the presence of domestic dogs corresponds to an uptick in wild boar hunting at ‘Ain Mallaha might not be a coincidence.
‘Ain Mallaha was abandoned around 10,000 BC. But both the increasing intensity of wild boar hunting—probably aided by dogs—and wild boar’s attraction to human settlements would play central roles in the domestication of pigs in the following millennia, when human populations across the Near East grew sharply and the number of sedentary settlements increased.
By 9700 BC, the Younger Dryas had ended and the climate in the Near East had stabilized. Sedentary lifestyles, which were largely abandoned in the 11th millennium BC, became favorable once again and human populations increased. At the same time, people across the Levant, central/southern Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia began to change how they acquired food.29 These changes set in motion domestication, that coevolutionary process by which organisms adapt to human exploitation, and humans modify their behaviors to protect and promote those animal/plant populations.
Archaeologists label the societies that inhabited the Near East beginning around 9700 BC as “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” (PPN) since they did not make ceramic vessels, but practiced sedentism and eventually domesticated plants and animals—cultural traits traditionally categorized as Neolithic. Archaeologists further distinguish the PPNA (9700–8500 BC) from the PPNB (8500–7000 BC). The PPNA saw the initial foundation of villages and the tending of wild cereals and legumes on a large scale, as well as the first steps toward developing relationships with populations of animals that would eventually become domesticated.30 By the beginning of the PPNB, plants had acquired the mutations transforming them into domesticates, and animals soon followed.
There is considerable debate about why people domesticated pigs as well as other plants and animals in the PPN. Some scholars, like zooarchaeologist Melinda Zeder,31 argue that humans are naturally experimental and will try to improve the reliability of their resource base whenever they can.32 We are niche constructors, “ultimate ecosystem engineers.”33 For Zeder and others, domestication happens when humans have occupied a place long enough for niche-constructing behaviors to have a cumulative effect on ecosystems and, significantly, when climatic conditions make it possible for people to settle down and intensify pressure on local environments. Other scholars have argued that humans are more conservative and exhibit ingenuity only when pushed to do so. They argue that groups of people will not change their subsistence behavior unless compelled by external factors, such as environmental/climate change, resource depression, or population pressure.34
In many respects, this debate hinges on philosophical differences. How self-directed are humans? How constrained are societies by their surroundings? Are humans open to change or are they inherently conservative? Such debates often come down to different outlooks. But what is valuable to the study of domestication—and, indeed, large-scale processes of social change in general—is that the different perspectives provide unique frameworks for collecting, interrogating, and understanding complex datasets. The dialogue between them, moreover, helps scholars home in on the details and think critically about their assumptions.
Recognizing the value of both perspectives, several recent papers have sought to reframe the discussion in terms of how both human ingenuity and external pressures led to changing subsistence practices at the beginning of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.35 Such a model highlights the importance of feedback between the environment and human behavior. For example, an improved climate would have allowed hunter-gatherers to intensify food procurement, which would have enabled greater population growth, increased population pressure, and incentivized people to settle into sedentary villages. This, in turn, would have forced or inspired neighboring communities to intensify their subsistence practices as well, further increasing population density and pressure on resources. The resulting feedback cycle would eventually lead people to invest more time and energy into managing plants and animals, unintentionally selecting for domestic varieties.36
But to focus only on human behavior in the process of domestication is to ignore the important fact that certain plants and animals are better suited for adaptation to human management. That is, the natural behaviors of some organisms enable them to fit within the human niche and benefit from it, in large part by inspiring humans to invest in raising and nurturing them.37 These “pro-domestic” species, for example, tend to exhibit considerable phenotypic plasticity—that is, they can alter the expression of behavioral and physiological traits depending on environmental conditions.38 Recognizing the importance of species’ natural behaviors and physiologies, some scholars have reframed the discussion of domestication, suggesting that these species, in fact, “chose” us.39 However, while it is certainly important to recognize the animal or plant partner in domestication, the process is ultimately driven by human cultural factors. No natural plant or animal behavior would lead to domestication were it not for two fundamental and innate features of Homo sapiens: our ability to initiate goal-oriented behavior40 and our compulsion to seek out relationships with other species.41
A subset of wild boar began its transition to domestic pig in the PPNA. While the period ended centuries before pigs developed the characteristics of the domestication syndrome (at least as far as zooarchaeologists have been able to detect), there is considerable evidence that interactions between humans and wild boar were changing beginning around 9700 BC. First, wild boar bones are found in proportions over 10 percent at a number of PPNA settlements.42 As we speculated about Natufian ‘Ain Mallaha, it is likely that (1) wild boar were drawn to sedentary villages and their garbage, and (2) that people were able to hunt wild boar more successfully with dogs. Second, PPNA hunters increasingly focused on killing animals less than three years old. This intensive hunting strategy, with roots in the Epipaleolithic or even Upper Paleolithic, increased the likelihood of obtaining pork and decreased the likelihood of being gored. It also may have been an early form of game management designed to kill off excess males and thereby increase the number of farrowing females within local ecosystems. Early forms of game management also involved the transportation of live wild boar to new locations—stocking them with favored game animals for future hunting. Finally, these new forms of human-swine relations probably inspired novel types of ritual behavior in PPNA communities. PPNA sites provide some of the earliest evidence for large-scale feasts involving pork.
Sometime between 9700 and 9300 BC, a group of hunter-gatherers decided to make their permanent home at Hallan Çemi in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey.43 They constructed several round huts, and within a few generations had deposited a large amount of animal bones and other garbage at the settlement. Many of these bones were found in a large pit at the center of the site, probably an area in which people congregated for large feasts.44 Around 25 percent of the medium and large mammal bones were from wild boar.45
At the time of discovery, the high percentage of wild boar bones at Hallan Çemi caused quite a stir. The number of Sus scrofa remains and the high proportion of juvenile animals represented in the assemblage suggested that the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi may have been raising and breeding wild boar. Specifically, the excavators argued46 that the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi kept small herds of females, which were allowed to mate with wild males—a situation similar to that observed ethnographically in parts of New Guinea, among other places.47 The announcement sent ripples through zooarchaeological channels. The New York Times picked up on the story, proclaiming that pigs were domesticated at Hallan Çemi almost 12,000 years ago.48
The initial excitement elicited by reports of the earliest domestic pigs at Hallan Çemi turned out to be misguided. There is no evidence for morphological change in the Hallan Çemi suids.49 There is no significant difference between the dental size of modern Turkish wild boar and that of wild boar from Hallan Çemi, which is what one would expect for a population of wild boar undergoing the process of domestication. The data suggest, in other words, that the wild boar from Hallan Çemi did not possess the characteristics of the domestication syndrome.
The swine at Hallan Çemi may not have been domesticated, but the zooarchaeological data nonetheless speak to the changing nature of human-suid relations in the PPNA. These changes were ultimately tied to the process of domestication. The abundance of wild boar remains, for example, suggests greater confidence in boar hunting. Meanwhile, the demographic profiles indicate that people were targeting animals less than three years old, which, as mentioned above, might reflect a game management strategy.50 There were also a large number fetal or newborn piglet remains. The excavators’ interpretation that the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi kept sows51 would indicate that people were already experimenting with breeding wild boar in captivity long before the first appearance of domestic pigs.
One could interpret the demographic data differently, however, and argue that they represent a unique form of hunting, not a management strategy. For example, the high proportion of juveniles could indicate a hunting strategy designed to obtain meat from younger—and thus smaller and less dangerous—animals.52 Or perhaps hunters targeted farrowing sows, which would be particularly vulnerable and easy prey since female swine leave their sounders to give birth.53 Another alternative is that sows, their young, and juvenile animals, which are often less wary of the dangers posed by humans, frequently wandered into the settlement. If so, then the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi may have killed these commensals in order both to eliminate a pest and to obtain meat from a readily available source.
Dogs may have aided these hunts. For example, they could sniff out farrowing females and keep a sow at bay while the hunters dispatched her and her litter, perhaps leaving the hunters the opportunity to capture a piglet and raise it back at the settlement.54 Several canid bones in the Hallan Çemi assemblage were tentatively identified as those of domestic dogs.55 Moreover, an image of what appears to be a dog wagging its tail was carved on a stone bowl that excavators recovered from the site.56 It is therefore likely that, if Hallan Çemi’s inhabitants were experimenting with new forms of boar hunting, or perhaps with capturing live animals, dogs were key elements.
The data from Hallan Çemi currently offer no clear indication about which of these alternatives is correct. Future research will be needed to determine exactly how humans and wild boar interacted in the PPNA. But the combination of intensive resource procurement and innovative approaches to animal populations represent important developments in human-suid relations. Even if they remained hunters, at some point the inhabitants of Hallan Çemi may have decided that a more efficient strategy would involve controlling the movements of sounders. This incipient game management strategy would represent an important step in the domestication process, signaling a shift in how humans thought about and exploited Sus scrofa. In fact, exciting finds from the island of Cyprus show such a process in action.
Another piece of evidence pertaining to the developing relationships between populations of wild boar and people in the PPNA comes from the island of Cyprus, where seafaring hunter-gatherers first landed in the late Epipaleolithic.57 Soon after people arrived, animals appeared on Cyprus that were not native to the island. One of these invasive species was wild boar. As Cyprus is separated from the mainland of the Near East by about 70 km, the only possible vector for transmission of wild boar and other nonendemic animals is humans. This suggests that people were stocking the island with the animals they wanted to hunt or live in their settlements, such as wild boar, wild cats, foxes, and domestic dogs. Later, they brought deer and (initially wild) sheep, goats, and cattle. 58
The faunal evidence indicates that wild boar were among the first animals introduced to Cyprus. The earliest published evidence comes from the cave site of Akrotiri Aetokremnos, where excavators recovered 18 wild boar bones and teeth.59 The team was able to directly radiocarbon-date the bones to between 9700 and 9400 BC, a date contemporaneous with the occupation of Hallan Çemi.60 Akrotiri Aetokremnos thus provides some of the clearest evidence that humans were pursuing a game management system involving the capture and transportation of wild boar in the millennia prior to the initiation of fully fledged controlled breeding and domestication.61 Such quintessentially human niche-constructing behaviors secured the earliest Cypriots a reliable source of meat for centuries to come.62
A final piece of evidence for evolving human-suid interactions in the PPNA is the increasingly important role of wild boar in rituals. Throughout the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, human communities introduced significant changes in their ritual practices; on a regional level, they invested more time and resources into ceremonial activities. The reasons for this shift in ritual behavior are complex, but likely stem from the unique challenges facing Neolithic peoples. For example, sedentism and population growth forced larger numbers of people to live closer to one another, thus fostering social tension. The subsistence economy, increasingly dependent on management/cultivation strategies and a delayed-returns approach to acquiring food, was another source of anxiety, one that manifested itself both at the individual and social level. Rituals helped relieve these stresses, diverting this anxious energy into community-building activities.63 Wild boar played a role in these rituals. While zooarchaeologists cannot completely understand the social and religious significance of wild boar, we can see evidence of a more prominent role for these animals in two types of activities: feasting and symbolic representation.
Feasting, or the communal consumption of food, is an important component of public ritual cross-culturally.64 Feasts, especially those involving large groups of people, can create a sense of togetherness and a shared sense of participation in socially meaningful activity. This promotes social cohesion. On the other hand, in some contexts, feasting can exclude and alienate people, such as members of other ethnic groups, genders, and social classes. Feasts can also be a means by which more ambitious individuals, playing the role of feast-giver, can display and promote their power and wealth to the community.65
Meat is a common component of feasts in many cultures, past and present. Generally speaking, humans crave the taste of meat. They devote much time and many resources to acquiring it. But meat also tends to be quite symbolically loaded. The nature of its procurement (hunting or slaughtering), preparation (butchery and cooking), and consumption are often highly social activities.66 Hunting and slaughtering an animal, in particular, are emotionally charged undertakings, acts of violence that, in many cultures, warrant praying to the god(s) or requests for forgiveness from the animal’s spirit. In other cultures, people have devised different ways to overcome this guilt: rituals that regulate how to kill animals (e.g., kosher or halal slaughter), taboos that restrict consumption or harm of certain animals, a conceptualization of a hierarchy of beings, and metaphors that recast hunting as an act mimicking sexuality or warfare.67 Despite these cultural constructs, the trauma of killing another animate being, not to mention the inner turmoil caused by contradictory impulses to feel compassion toward animals and at the same time to lust after their flesh, lends meat its power.
Zooarchaeological indications of feasting can be difficult to differentiate from those derived from more quotidian meals. However, the relatively rapid deposition of a high volume of animal bones bearing cut marks and other evidence for human consumption can be taken as a sign of feasting. One example of this type of deposit was found at Hallan Çemi, where the sheer number of wild boar and other animal bones within a pit at the center of the settlement argues for large-scale feasting.68
Another example of feasting derives from a spectacular find at the site of Tappeh Asiab in Iran, dating to around 9400 BC.69 There, in a single discrete deposit, excavators found the skulls of 19 wild boar as well as numerous long bones bearing cut marks from ancient butchers. The 19 animals, the majority of whose ages ranged from three months old to three years old, would have produced at least several hundred kilograms of meat, enough for hundreds of people. Such an event not only would have included all the inhabitants of Asiab, but also could have attracted people from outside the community, whose presence would have reinforced friendly relations and perhaps political allegiance. The symbolic importance of this particular feast at Asiab is demonstrated by the care with which the remains of the consumed animals were deposited. The wild boar skulls were neatly packed together and laid down along an east-west axis along with the boars’ long bones, the skull of a bear, and deer antlers .70
While pork was good to eat, wild boar were also potent symbols. We can only speculate on what wild boar meant to prehistoric peoples, such as the feast participants at Tappeh Asiab, but the fact that hunting them was a formidable enterprise would have lent itself to connotations of ferocity, masculinity, and power. Some of the most tantalizing—if cryptic—evidence comes from the site of Göbekli Tepe. Göbekli, located near the modern city of Urfa in Turkey, was a large cultic site used by hunter-gatherers around 9200–8500 BC. The site consists of a series of standing T-shaped stone pillars contained within sunken circular buildings. Archaeologists have excavated about 20 of these “enclosures,” each measuring 10–20 meters in diameter.71 One of the most striking features of Göbekli Tepe is the array of animal imagery carved into the stone pillars. Dozens of individual beasts, including snakes, foxes, bears, wild sheep, aurochsen, and wild boar, are represented in various poses alongside geometric designs and the occasional human phallus. Interestingly, the enclosures seem to be themed around certain animals or groups of animals. Snakes, for example, dominate Enclosure D. Enclosure C, on the other hand, has a heavy concentration of wild boar. Like the one shown in Figure 3.1, many of these wild boar are visibly male and are depicted with bared teeth and menacing tusks.
Figure 3.1. Stone pillar from Göbekli Tepe (Enclosure C) decorated with bas-relief image of a male wild boar and other animals.
Some archaeologists have indulged in a healthy dose of speculation on the imagery from Göbekli. The enclosures may, for example, have served as shrines in a cult of the dead.72 There is also a detectable masculine theme to the rituals, such as the representations of human phalluses and large-tusked boars. Perhaps the rituals carried out at the site drew upon the symbolic imagery of the hunt, a masculine activity that was beginning to be replaced by animal herding. While these and other hypotheses about Göbekli amount to little more than informed guesswork, the symbolic representation of wild boar suggests that people in the PPNA were beginning to think about these animals in new ways, drawing on them as symbols of human values.
The examples from Hallan Çemi, Cyprus, Asiab, and Göbekli Tepe show how human-suid relationships were evolving in various corners of the Near East in the PPNA. These new relationships would lay the foundations for domestication in the PPNB. Zooarchaeologist Melinda Zeder73 has suggested two main pathways for early animal domestication.74 The first is the “prey pathway,” in which people begin to control animal herds, first as a form of game management, later by more actively interfering in animals’ daily lives. Once management becomes intense enough, people cross the threshold to animal husbandry and unintentionally select for mutations that underpin the characteristics of the domestication syndrome. The second route to domestication is what Zeder has called the “commensal pathway,” in which animals take the initiative by invading human settlements and adapting to them as commensals. Only later, when humans recognize the economic value of these animals, did they begin to raise and breed them.
There is good reason to believe that wild boar followed both Zeder’s prey and commensal pathways to domestication. A dual pathway model particularly makes sense when we consider the role of cultivated cereals and legumes.75 In terms of the prey pathway, there is solid evidence at Hallan Çemi and Akrotiri Aetokremnos that people had begun to hunt or manage wild boar with new tactics and, in some cases, capture and transport them. At some point, sedentary PPNA hunter-gatherers probably got the idea that providing animals with food would ensure that the animals stayed healthy and close at hand. Providing food would also habituate young animals to people, such that they would conceive human caretakers as trusted herdmates. This critical step, called imprinting by animal ecologist, solidified bonds between humans and individual animals. It remains an important feature of husbandry today. As the bond tightened, some people were inspired to consider animals not just as sources of meat, but also as property. This fostered even greater investment in animal care. The plants raised by people at PPNA settlements, themselves undergoing domestication, were therefore key elements in the transformation of prey into livestock. Cultivated plants provided a reliable source of fodder that enabled humans to pursue new forms of suid management..
We know less about the commensal pathway that wild boar also took towards domestication. This is because it is more difficult to detect with traditional zooarchaeological techniques. However, we can be reasonably sure that commensalism took place because of what we know about the behavior of wild boar: their willingness to infiltrate human settlements to eat garbage and cultivated crops. Indeed, ravaging PPNA horticultural fields would have made wild boar quite a pest, but one that could be drawn upon as a reliable food source by humans. For the commensal wild boar, there would be selection pressure to be less wary of people—the better to eat humans’ cultivated plants and settlement refuse. These commensal populations would have stayed close to villages and probably interbred quite freely with managed wild boar. Ultimately, they helped create a gene pool that, existing under a unique set of selection pressures, diverged from those of wild boar experienced minimal contact with humans.
The reader might be wondering at this point why pig domestication took so long if all the pieces were in place by the PPNA. In experimental studies, animal populations can display domestication syndrome phenotypes after just 10–20 generations of selection.76 For wild boar, that amounts to less than half a century, but even by the early phases of the PPNB—1,000 years after the occupation of Hallan Çemi—there was no evidence for domestic pigs. The reason is not entirely clear, but two factors are important to consider. First, we don’t know how many times domestication failed before it succeeded. How many times, in other words, were people on their way to domesticating pigs, but then switched hunting strategies or experienced a catastrophe that wiped out their herd, such as a disease jumping from people to wild boar? Second, managed animals or scavenging commensals could still mate with other wild boar, those who were not drawn into the human orbit. In fact, people probably relied on strategically restocking their herds with wild-living animals. This created continuous gene flow from the wild. For domestication to occur, the selection for domestic mutations had to be intense enough and over a large enough area to overcome this “out-breeding” problem. In the PPNA, the selection pressures may not have been quite high enough and/or human populations may not have been dense enough to cause pig domestication.
By the 9th millennium BC, populations of wild boar began to develop and sustain the mutations that would transform them into domestic pigs, selecting for the traits of the domestication syndrome. Along with pigs, PPNB villagers living in the foothills of the Zagros and Taurus Mountains also domesticated sheep, goats, and cattle.77 The appearance of domestic animals at this time was no doubt related to regional population increase, sedentism, and the presence of now-domesticated cereal and legume crops.
Current zooarchaeological evidence indicates that domestic pigs were present by the Middle PPNB. Several sites in southern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia show an increase in the proportion of Sus scrofa remains between the Early (8700–8200 BC) and Middle PPNB (8200–7500 BC).78 More intriguing, measurements from Sus scrofa remains at some Middle PPNB sites indicate that the individual animals possessed small bodies and teeth, features consistent with those of the domestication syndrome.79 The best evidence comes from the site of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Turkey, which was occupied for around 3,000 years from the PPNA through the end of the PPNB.80
Çayönü’s long and continuous occupation from about 9500 to 6500 BC makes it an ideal site for studying the process of pig domestication. It is also significant that almost 30 percent of its sizable faunal assemblage (and over 38 percent of the medium and large mammals) derive from Sus scrofa, enabling a more detailed study of pig domestication than at contemporaneous sites where suids are less common and bone assemblages smaller. From the earliest occupation in PPNA, the inhabitants of Çayönü hunted wild boar in large numbers and, as at Hallan Çemi, they focused on young animals. As at Hallan Çemi, around two-thirds of animals were killed before they were two years old. But at Çayönü, almost 60 percent of the wild boar were less than one year old at death, compared with 40 percent at Hallan Çemi. The high proportion of very young animals is strikingly similar to that observed in later contexts in which domestic pigs were being raised.81
In the centuries that followed the PPNA, the inhabitants of Çayönü gradually exerted greater effort to control and feed the suid populations, interacting with the animals more frequently and regularly. Demographic patterns indicate these changes. While the proportion of animals killed at less than one year of age remained stable over time, the villagers exploited fewer old animals; by the abandonment of the site in the 7th millennium BC, around 85 percent of the swine had been killed prior to reaching two years of age.82 This is exactly the kind of demographic profile one would expect for a herd of domestic swine in which humans cull animals not needed for reproduction once they reach an ideal weight.
Other evidence indicates that swine management was becoming more intensive over time at Çayönü. The incidence of hypoplasias on suid teeth was much higher in the Early and Middle PPNB at Çayönü (43 percent of teeth affected) than in the PPNA at Çayönü (22 percent) and at Hallan Çemi (21 percent).83 Hypoplasias are linear or pitlike depressions in tooth enamel caused by a temporary cessation of growth. Enamel growth halts when an animal experiences certain forms of physiological stress, especially those related to insufficient diet or acute illness. The proportion of pigs’ teeth affected by hypoplasias is thought to increase as people ramp up their management of pigs, which may cause the animals to experience dietary shortages or be exposed to new pathogens from their human hosts.84 Alternatively, the increase in hypoplasias might reflect increased rates of survival of such stressors through human intervention. While this may seem paradoxical, the appearance of hypoplasias requires both the application of stressor (e.g., illness) and the survival of that stressor.85 Humans caring for sick or underfed piglets, which would otherwise die in the wild, could lead to an increase in the rate of hypoplasias. In either case, however, the data from Çayönü suggest that human interference in suid populations increased after the PPNA.
Finally, the biometrical data provide some of the most convincing evidence for domestication. Measurements taken on suid teeth and bones from Çayönü exhibit a subtle but significant reduction over time. The decrease in size, shown in Figure 3.2, was gradual. The trend first appears in the Early PPNB phase,86 but continues on through the entire span of the site’s occupation, with a brief reversal in the trend in the Late PPNB, which might relate to the temporary abandonment of the settlement. Taken together, the demographic, pathological, and metrical data show a clear trend: beginning in the early phases of the PPNB, the inhabitants of Çayönü and other settlements in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains controlled suid populations over a long enough period of time and in a manner sufficiently intense to enable the slow development of domesticated pigs.
Figure 3.2. The gradual decline of pig dental size over time at Çayönü and nearby sites. Numbers inside boxplot squares indicate sample size. This figure uses the log-size index of molar breadth measurements. This method compares observed values against those of a standard, in this case the mean values of the modern wild boar presented in the figure.
To the untrained eye, the domestic pigs of the PPNB would have more closely resembled wild boar than the sheepherding hero of Babe. The changes were subtle, at least at first. And the process was slow enough that people may not have been aware of any major changes in suid physiology or behavior. But by 7500 BC, villagers across northern Mesopotamia were raising pigs that were significantly smaller, shorter-faced, and more docile than their wild boar ancestors.87 Villagers at Çayönü and other places also probably considered these animals property, of individual families or of the community as a whole. That is, they thought of pigs as belonging to people rather than as independent beings.
While they probably considered pigs property, the first pig breeders probably did not practice intensive husbandry. If wild boar were initially penned during the process of domestication, we would expect a rapid onset of the domestication syndrome as domestic pigs were reproductively cut off from wild populations and subjected to intense selection pressures. We would also expect the virtual elimination of older animals and especially older males, which would have been particularly difficult to keep in pens. For the same reason, we would expect the average age at death to decline suddenly, not gradually. In fact, the Çayönü data show the exact opposite of these expectations. The slow pace of changes in morphology and the age at death all point to extensive husbandry—perhaps reminiscent of pig husbandry in parts of New Guinea today.88
To conclude, for over one million years, suids were an unpopular target for Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. Things began to change in the Epipaleolithic and PPNA, when people began living in permanent settlements and practicing horticulture. Responding to new opportunities (more dependable resources) and new dilemmas (population pressure), people intensified their exploitation of the animals within their local environments, creating new selection pressures for sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. The intensified hunting of wild boar, which transitioned into game management (e.g., at Hallan Çemi) and then herd management (e.g., at Çayönü), coincided with wild boar being attracted to human settlements; pigs followed the prey and commensal pathways to domestication.
While human niche-constructing activities were vital to initiating the process of domestication, we cannot ignore the unique biology and behavior of pigs that made them amenable to life among people. There’s an old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change to a lightbulb: just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change. The same principle can be applied to domestication. Although humans and the unique ecosystem niches they create are the driving factors behind domestication, the target species themselves must be able to find a way to thrive in these new settings.
The dual prey-commensal pathway created a unique opportunity for wild boar to live in the “human niche”89 and, beginning in the 9th millennium BC, to evolve into domestic pigs. In the process, Sus scrofa became a more reliable source of food for humans, whose populations were growing at a rapid clip. As a result, humans intensified their management practices, which in turn ramped up the selection for genes and phenotypes advantageous to human control. This runaway feedback loop, taking centuries to play out, had radical consequences. Sus scrofa transitioned from a relatively ignored prey species to a major livestock animal. Within a few millennia, Sus scrofa had become one of the most successful mammals on the planet with a global population in the hundreds of millions.
For humans, the domestication of plants and livestock had no less dramatic consequences. Birthrates increased as more food became available. However, their nutritionally deficient and starch-rich diets, the crowded and unsanitary conditions of their villages, and the backbreaking labor involved in farming led to a health decline among the first farmers.90 Nevertheless, the explosive population increase initiated by plant and animal domestication helped establish farming as the dominant way of life in the Near East. By the close of the Neolithic, societies were bound, for better or worse, to agriculture. This was truly revolutionary, for it was agriculture that set the stage for the development of cities, writing, mathematics, and the other hallmarks of Near Eastern civilization. It also helped spawn economic inequality, imperialism, slavery, and environmental degradation.