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,

facility, 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 in 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 scenario for the development

of the modern pig genome includes gene flow from some species of European wild boars that are now

extinct, but their genes live on on the farm, the researchers in the journal Nature farm. The authors hope this study will

prompt the use of genetics to evaluate the domestication history for other

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