For millions of years, humans and pigs shared similar diets and habitats yet remained
little more than distant neighbors. Only around 10,000 years ago did their relationship begin shifting toward domestication. Decades ago, Robert Braidwood posed a key question: Why didn’t domestication happen earlier? This presentation revisits that question by examining human-pig interactions in ancient China. It begins with the earliest encounters between hominins and wild boars in the Pleistocene, exploring why early hunters largely avoided wild boars in favor of other prey. A turning point came in the early Holocene, when sedentary human settlements created new ecological dynamics. The accumulation of refuse heaps provided a novel niche, altering evolutionary pressures on wild boars and facilitating their gradual adaptation to human-modified landscapes. Over generations, these shifts set the stage for domestication. By tracing this long process, this presentation considers pig domestication as a mutual transformation, shaped human activities and, more importantly, the agency of pigs themselves. The talk also highlights how microfossil analysis from dental calculus offers direct evidence of dietary elements and environmental conditions, providing new insights into shifting human- animal relationships in the past.
