Scientific name of pig is Suidae. Pigs in domestic animals occupy a special place. Initially having a very narrow application, they, nevertheless, played a prominent role in the history of human civilization. On the one hand, these ungulates have become one of the most popular species of livestock, on the other hand they have earned the fame of dirty and unworthy animals.
The history of the relationship between man and pig began 13,000 years ago with the taming of a wild boar. We can say that the animals themselves gave the occasion for domestication. Wild boars, being omnivores, easily mastered the cultural landscapes: they raided the cultivated fields and willingly ransacked the garbage near the dwellings.
In order to protect the harvest, as well as to obtain meat, people began to catch these animals and keep them in pens. The most interesting thing is that this happened in the area where now there are no pigs in principle – in the Near East. About 8,000 years ago, the boar was re-domesticated in China. In the future, the fate of these two populations of pigs has developed in different ways.
Pigs from the Near East, together with people, gradually settled to the west and reached the territory of the Eastern Mediterranean. From the lands of modern Israel, they fell into the possession of the Greeks (present-day Turkey and Greece). It should be noted that the number of pigs in these places was badly lost to sheep and goats, and for this there was a reason. If the sheep and goats could graze on the barren rocks and perfectly tolerated the heat of the semi-deserts, the pigs, being inhabitants of the forest, did not tolerate high temperatures, so they kept them only in the stable or limited to grazing in local oak forests.
