Pigs as Pets: Early Human Relations with the Sulawesi Warty Pig (Sus celebensis)

SIMPLE SUMMARY: In the early 1980s, the late Colin Groves (1942–2017), a noted taxonomist and suid specialist, proposed that the Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis), an endemic suid from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, had been independently domesticated by a pre-Neolithic human population (that is, a non-sedentary foraging society) and translocated by watercraft to other islands in the region. This conflicts with two central premises in our understanding of the origins of animal domestication: (1) that the wolf was the only animal domesticated by hunter-gatherers prior to the Neolithic farming transition around 12,000–10,000 years ago; and (2) that the beginnings of pig domestication were inextricably tied to the advent of crop-raising and settled agrarian communities. This paper considers whether it is plausible to suggest that a non-sedentary population of hunter-gatherers could have domesticated a wild suid. It is proposed that pre-agricultural foragers could have established a close association with wild-living members of S. celebensis that was similar to the relationship of interspecies companionship that is purported to have existed between Late Pleistocene foragers and juvenile wolves, according to some, leading to the first domesticated dogs. ABSTRACT: The Sulawesi warty pig (S. celebensis) is a wild and still-extant suid that is endemic to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It has long been theorised that S. celebensis was domesticated and/or deliberately introduced to other islands in Indonesia prior to the advent of the Neolithic farming transition in the region. Thus far, however, there has been no empirical support for this idea, nor have scientists critiqued the argument that S. celebensis was a pre-Neolithic domesticate in detail. Here, it is proposed that early foragers could have formed a relationship with S. celebensis that was similar in essence to the close association between Late Pleistocene foragers in Eurasia and the wild wolf ancestors of domestic dogs. That is, a longstanding practice of hunter-gatherers intensively socialising wild-caught S. celebensis piglets for adoption into human society as companion animals (‘pets’) may have altered the predator–prey dynamic, brought aspects of wild pig behaviour and reproduction under indirect human selection and control, and caused changes that differentiated human-associated pigs from their solely wild-living counterparts.