Pork accounts for more than a third of the world’s meat, making pigs among the planet’s most widely consumed animals. They are also widely reviled: For about two billion people, eating pork is explicitly prohibited. The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Koran both forbid adherents from eating pig flesh, and this ban is one of humanity’s most deeply entrenched dietary restrictions. For centuries, scholars have struggled to find a satisfying explanation for this widespread taboo. “There are an amazing number of misconceptions people continue to have about pigs,” says archaeologist Max Price of Durham University, who is among a small group of scholars scouring both modern excavation reports and ancient tablets for clues about the rise and fall of pork consumption in the ancient Near East. “That makes this research both frustrating and fascinating.”

Among the most surprising finds is that the inhabitants of the earliest cities of the Bronze Age (3500–1200 b.c.) were enthusiastic pig eaters, and that even later Iron Age (1200–586 b.c.) residents of Jerusalem enjoyed the occasional pork feast. Yet despite a wealth of data and new techniques including ancient DNA analysis, archaeologists still wrestle with many porcine mysteries, including why the once plentiful animal gradually became scarce long before religious taboos were enacted. Ultimately, the tale of the pig in the ancient Near East reveals how humans thrived in the first cities, the ways in which economic inequality shaped early urban societies, and the important role that diet played in defining ethnic groups and distinguishing friend from foe.

Pigs are prolific. A single sow can mother up to 100 piglets, far more than sheep, goats, or cows, and their offspring can reach maturity in about six months. They require less than half the amount of water needed by a cow or a horse, making them more drought tolerant. In many parts of the globe, past and present, pigs root through trash, converting noxious garbage into nutritious food. Today, one billion pigs are slaughtered annually to produce a wide array of food products, including pork chops, ham hocks, bacon, and lard. 

The domestic pig’s story begins with the wild boar, Sus scrofa, which roamed Southeast Asia more than five million years ago and slowly spread across Asia into Europe. Early humans hunted this intelligent, fierce animal across both continents. Some 10,000 years ago in the Near East, and a few millennia later in China, S. scrofa began to transform into S. scrofa domesticus. Precisely how this took place is only now coming into focus.

In the 1990s, at the site of Hallan Çemi in southeastern Anatolia, archaeologists unearthed 51,000 animal bones dating to about 10,000 b.c. Of these, boar bones made up nearly one in five of the recovered remains, suggesting that the animal was an important source of meat. Researchers also found that nearly half the boars were less than a year old when killed, and that most of the rest were under three. 

Archaeologist Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History argues that settlements such as Hallan Çemi mark the start of the long process of pig domestication, which began around the same time humans started to live in permanent settlements and to transform wild grasses into cultivated grain. “Boars were drawn to places humans inhabited, with their accumulation of trash, as well as to their fields,” Zeder says. The animals’ proximity allowed hunters to pick and choose their prey. “People had a culling strategy that encouraged the growth of herds,” she adds, noting that hunters targeted young male boars and allowed sows to live in order to breed. Pigs’ significance to the people of these early settlements is reflected in the numerous representations of wild boars that have been discovered at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (ca. 10,000–8200 b.c.) site of Göbeklitepe, also in southeastern Anatolia.

At another site in the region, called Çayönü Tepesi, which began to be settled around 8600 b.c., archaeologists excavating from the 1960s to the 1990s unearthed a number of boar molars and skulls that came from younger animals and were smaller than those dating to the beginning of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Zeder believes that these morphological changes show that the people living at Çayönü Tepesi—and, almost certainly, at other settlements in the area—were beginning to put the wild animal on the path to domestication. 

The first site in the Near East where archaeologists have found unmistakable evidence of pig domestication is Tel Motza, a large Neolithic settlement established around 8600 b.c. in what is now Jerusalem. In 2012, archaeologists uncovered large numbers of bones there dating to just after 7000 b.c. that show clear signs of traits associated with the fully domesticated pig, which is smaller, shorter-faced, and more docile than its wild cousin. Further excavations across the region have shown that S. scrofa domesticus appeared not long after at other Neolithic sites.

The spread of domesticated pigs was slower and more uneven than it was for sheep and goats, which were domesticated at roughly the same time. Pigs appear to have thrived in areas with access to water and forests where they could forage for nuts. These omnivorous animals not only provided copious meat, but also cleaned up food scraps and human waste that might attract pests or spread disease. Caches of deliberately buried bones at Neolithic sites provide evidence that people slaughtered pigs for barbecues that may have encouraged social cohesion as well as serving as a nutritious meal. At the site of Ayn Ghazal in Amman, Jordan, a Neolithic settlement inhabited by some 3,000 people that flourished from around 7200 to 5000 b.c., archaeologists in the 1980s found pig skulls buried with those belonging to humans, indicating that people perceived the animal as important in ways beyond its utility as a food source. 

With the growth of the world’s first urban areas, starting in southern Mesopotamia around 3500 b.c., pigs found their niche. Yet their central role in the development of the earliest cities in what is now southern Iraq has been overlooked and underestimated. “We often imagine Mesopotamian foodways in the Bronze Age as having no pigs, but most meat eaten in the largest cities was pork,” Price says. “Big cities are fantastic places to raise pigs. They have shade, stagnant water, and are protected from predators.” And they have lots of trash. 

Although archaeologists have found large numbers of pig bones at early cities such as Uruk, ruminants—animals including cows with four-chambered stomachs that can digest grass—dominate the written record that evolved in tandem with urban life. Herds of sheep, goats, and cattle were relatively easy for government officials to oversee, says Price. Not so pigs, which can live, breed, and be slaughtered quickly in a backyard lot. The swine didn’t need grazing land, just the day’s leftovers. “Large-scale management of pigs really wasn’t possible,” says Zeder. “The small-scale nature of pig raising became a beacon for the urban poor. It existed as a sub-rosa element of the economy.” 

Thousands of clay tablets uncovered across Mesopotamia show that scribes gave short shrift to an animal that was difficult to tax. And excavations reveal that those living in wealthy households, palaces, and temples came to prefer mutton and beef, likely reflecting pork’s lowly reputation. Ruminants a