Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years. Yacold also

partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for

gut health, an investigator-led research program. To learn more about Yachtold, visit yawcult.co.com.

That's Y-A-K-U-L-T dot CO.JP. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Cynthia Graber.

Got a minute?

The standard story told about domesticating wild animals goes something like this.

Human selected individuals with a desired trait, docility, for example, and bred those animals

together to produce offspring even more docile than their parents.

Eventually, the breeders created a genetic bottleneck

that separated domestic animals from their wild relatives, and they brought their livestock along

as they spread across Europe and Asia. But now a group of scientists has demonstrated that the story

is far too tidy, at least when it comes to pigs. Pigs were domesticated from wild boar at least

twice in Anatolia and present-day Turkey

and in the Mekong Valley and China both about 9,000 years ago. They arrived in Europe about

7,500 years ago. For this study, researchers focused on European pigs. They evaluated more than

600 genomes from European and Asian wild boars and domesticated pigs. And they found

that in Europe, the story of a bottleneck separating domestic from wild animals does not fit

the genetic data. Rather, the model that does fit indicates that there was a frequent

flow of genes from wild European boars into the domestic population. In other words,

boars and pigs kept finding ways to get together. The most likely

...