|Here is a handsome wild boar. He shows his domestic ancestry in the band across his shoulders which is called a "list". In spite of clear evidence of some domestic genes, he is among the true wild type.|
|There are 23 subspecies
of hogs worldwide (most of them warty), but there is only one species in
the US: Sus scrofa (The family is Suidae, thus the hog call, "sui".)
Just as our countless breeds of dogs were all derived from the wolf, our
varieties of domestic hogs and all of their feral relatives were all derived
from the Eurasian Wild Boar. They are incidentally not at all related
to the southwest's javalina (collared peccary).|
The ancestors of the hog go back to the Ice Age, and their domestication was somewhere between 5000 to 9000 years ago. The American continents have no native hogs as the cold, snow and glaciers of the Ice Age blocked the hog's access to the North American Continent. Columbus in 1493 brought 8 hogs to the West Indies. Importation to the American mainland was in the mid 1500's by Cortez and De Soto, and in the mid 1600's by La Salle. Pure Eurasian boar were not brought here until they were imported for sport hunting in the early 1900's.
In the US the pure Eurasian hog is classed as an exotic, and the rest of the wild boar, originally domestic animals gone wild, are feral.
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