Re:Ubiquitous Medieval Pigs
by bigmattystyles on Monday November 02, 2020 @06:35PM
(#24974736)
Aren't those boars though? Or are those the boars and pigs same animal just that one is feral? My knowledge of boars is entirely from Asterix and Obelix so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Though if the comics (from 1950) are to be believed, they were also aplenty in Gaul 2000 years ago.
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Not many people know that if you take the standard domesticated pig we’re all used to and let it roam free, it will change physically and behaviorally pretty quickly and resemble a boar. Pretty “wild” stuff.
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/31104/202...
It's not entirely clear how many generations this take and whether breeding with the wild population is involved though. This would be extremely fascinating if we knew this to be entirely epigenetic...
It happens in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have wild pigs.
The boars they eat in Astérix are Sus Scrofa. The pigs we eat nowadays are originally the same species, now slightly altered by domestication and selection. They are sometimes considered as a subspecies Sus Scrofa Domesticus, and sometimes their own species Sus Domesticus. In any case, they are very close to each other, and I am not sure the difference between a feral Sus Domesticus and a proper Sus Scrofa would be significant. They still can mate.
There were indeed plenty of boars in medieval Europe, and there still are plenty of them now.