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| Sheila's Page | Sus scrofa |
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All domestic pigs are descended from the wild boar, Sus scrofa. Under domestication, the skull tends to become foreshortened, and the profile more concave. Also featured on this website, Peccary. |
TAXONOMY
Order - artiodactyla (cloven-hoofed)
Suborder - suiformes ("pig-like")
Family - suidae (pigs) |
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| "British" Wild Boar, male | Wild Boar / Domestic Pig hybrid, female |
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| Domestic Pig, young female (gilt) | Vietnamese Pot-bellied Pig, male |
| Pigs' skulls are easily recognised, due to the high, sloping crest at the back, formed by the supraoccipital and parietal bones. The teeth, too, are distinctive. The canines form large tusks in both sexes, the upper canine growing outward or upward, and the cheek teeth have a unique pattern of small points and cusps. Pigs have an additional, separate prenasal bone at the tip of the snout. The taxonomy of Sus scrofa is, however, rather confused, with many sub-species, local varieties and domestic breeds. Some of the free-living animals may be truly wild stock, while others are domestic varieties gone feral, or may have interbred with domestic pigs to varying degrees. This interbreeding could have been going on for a long time - there is evidence of domestic pigs in the pre-pottery layers of Jericho (7000BC). (See Cat) It is therefore difficult, in some cases, to say just what is a wild boar, and what is a domestic pig, or to assign a wild boar to a particular subspecies. Many attempts have been made to find a magic measurement which would sort out at least some of the main groups. Attention has been focussed on the lacrimal bone, which tends to persist in archaeological deposits and has a variable shape, perhaps reflecting elements of skull shape such as the foreshortening of domestic varieties. It may in fact be too variable, and it has even been suggested that the shape of the lacrimal bone can be affected by the amount of rooting a pig does in its early months, due to the effect of a muscle running from the lacrimal to the snout tip. It is nevertheless pretty obvious that the domestic gilt and vietnamese pot-belly illustrated above are domestic varieties, due to their foreshortening. The difference might not be so obvious to an archaeologist, who may be dealing with cooked fragments of young animals. The whole scenario only serves to emphasise that the collector can contribute to such debates, but only if he discovers and records as much as possible about the origins of his specimens. |
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| Pigs' tusks self-sharpen against each other. |