Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig by Mark Essig Read Free Book Online

docility come packaged with other juvenile traits, such as a shorter snout and smaller teeth. Just as domestic pigs preserve their juvenile docility into adulthood, they hold on to a more juvenile skull shape too. Scientists know that when they find adult facial bones of a certain shape, they are looking at a domestic pig.
    The changing shapes of the bones at Cayönü Tepesi indicate a gradual process of domestication. The archaeological record reveals that, over the 2,000-year period of settlement at the site, wild boars lived among people, gradually evolving into domestic pigs.
    The same continuum from wild to domestic characterizes the archaeological record of other domestic animals, but it’s worth noting a crucial difference. Goats and sheep became domestic through their role as prey for human hunters: people first killed wild animals, then managed wild herds, and finally managed domestic herds. Pigs became domestic through their relationship not with humans as hunters but rather with humans as villagers. People tracked down goats, but pigs tracked down people. Once domesticated, goats retained their original habitat, the scrubby hills and grassland outside town, whereas pigs took up residence right alongside humans. From the start, it was a more intimate relationship, involving everyone who lived in town rather than just herders assigned to the task.
    Pigs, moreover, had a job to do beyond providing meat. They cleaned up the waste that accumulated in each village they occupied: dead animals, rotten food, and human feces. Thevillagers could not have understood that this was a useful public health measure, but they would have been happy to be rid of the stink.
    Pigs possessed alchemical powers, transforming garbage into food. At first, this must have seemed like a godsend. In time, however, people came to despise the pig for doing precisely the job it had evolved to do.
    * As America’s feral swine problem indicates, this process also works in reverse.

THREE
    “The Pig Is Impure”
    B uilt in about 2550 bc , the Great Pyramid of Giza stands 455 feet tall and comprises some 2.3 million blocks of stone weighing about 13 billion pounds in aggregate. Archaeologists still argue over whether those stones were moved into place using levers, sledges, or oil-slicked ramps.Whatever the technical method, building the pyramids involved a feat of social engineering just as impressive as the mechanical: Egyptian authorities had to feed a workforce of thousands of people for decades at a time.
    The builders of the Great Pyramid called upon the resources of the entire Nile Valley to support this effort. The royal house sent orders to the heads of villages, who in turn sent men to the Giza site, along with grain and livestock to feed them. Workers drank beer, a muddy beverage fermented from grain and consumed more for nutrition than for pleasure. They ate heavy loaves of wheat and barley, supplemented with beef,mutton, and goat. One archaeologist analyzed some 300,000 bones at the pyramid complex and found that nearly all the animals eaten were young and male.This proved that Giza was a provisioned site, with animals raised elsewhere and the juvenile males—not needed for breeding—marched to slaughter at the pyramids.
    One village that provided livestock was Kom el-Hisn, located in the Nile delta about seventy-five miles downriver from the temple complex.Villagers at Kom el-Hisn raised cattle but ate very little beef: only the bones of worn-out breeding cows and sick calves have been uncovered there. Instead, the villagers ate pork: for every four cattle bones archaeologists unearthed at Kom el-Hisn, they found one hundred pig bones. It seems that the residents kept herds of pigs that foraged in the Nile delta marshes and scavenged trash on streets. Although Egypt’s rulers demanded cattle from Kom el-Hisn, along with goats and sheep from other settlements, the villagers’ pigs were spared.
    The reasons for this had to do with