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Foreword
The book you are holding goes a long way towards explaining
everything you always wanted to know about pigs and peccaries.
Pigs and humans have evolved together, and their relationships
are complicated. For early humans, wild pigs represented wor-
thy adversaries as a food source and potential competitors for a
variety of other foods. That dichotomy continues today, further
complicated by the early domestication of wild pigs for easier
access to people as a food source. That domestication hastened
the spread of one species, Sus scrofa, to almost every habitable
part of our planet. Domesticated populations have subsequently
gone feral on all continents save Antarctica, increasing competi-
tion by feeding on domesticated crops. This simplified summary
of events hides a wealth of fascinating detail that comes to light
in the pages that follow.
This volume is divided into three parts, with the first focused
on the evolution, taxonomy, and domestication of the families
Suidae and Tayassuidae. The initial chapter presents a system-
atic summary of the classification of the approximately 21 recent
species of pigs and peccaries currently surviving in the world.
The fact that I use the word ‘approximately’ in the preceding
sentence is testimony to the difficulty in classifying members of
these species groups. Almost certainly, more than one species
of wild pig has been domesticated at different times in different
parts of the world. The artificial movement of domesticated ani-
mals by humans over long periods of time, combined with the
return of feral animals to the wild, makes for endless possibili-
ties of cross-breeding. All of this makes for a bit of a muddle in
defining species limits for the group. Modern molecular meth-
ods combined with careful morphological studies in a phylo-
genetic approach are continuing to refine our knowledge of the
evolution of these important animals. The authors of this first
chapter, Jaime Gongora, Colin Groves, and Erik Meijaard, have
made major contributions to our understanding of the evolu-
tion of these two families for many years, lending considerable
credence to the scheme they outline here.
Chapter 2 is an overview of postcranial skeletal morphol-
ogy in living and fossil pigs from Africa, by Laura C. Bishop.
Paleoecologists are frequently presented with small bits of skele-
ton that not only have to be identified, but often are the only clues
to examine ecological parameters of fossil forms. By defining
and quantifying skeletal characteristics of modern forms with
ecological correlates, fossil remains can be compared to gain
some idea of their habits and habitats. This type of extrapolation
greatly expands our ability to understand habitat preferences of
fossil forms that no longer exist.
Teeth are among the most common elements studied by pale-
ontologists and zooarchaeologists. In Chapter 3, Antoine Souron
examines the dental morphology and ecology (mostly based on
stable carbon isotopes of tooth enamel) in extant and fossil wild
pigs. He focuses on the last 8 million years of the rich African fos-
sil record to understand how several wild pigs because indepen-
dently adapted to herbivorous diets. Further insights based on
dental characters are provided in Chapter 4 by Allowen Evin, Keith
Dobney, and Thomas Cucchi. They use geometric morphometrics
to reconstruct pig domestication in Europe. Using both recent and
ancient material, they explore pig variability in time and space,
tracing both domestication patterns and dispersal routes.
The final chapter in Part I, by David J. Nemeth, is entitled
‘Space, time and pig’. Combining personal observations with
East Asian Neo-Confucian cosmology, he focuses on the chang-
ing relationship between humans and pigs from the Holocene
to the Anthropocene. By contrasting human views of pigs into
two categories, ‘as-pigs’ and ‘as-pork’, he provides a not-so-
subtle reminder that our treatment of domesticated animals
leaves something to be desired.
Part II of the book provides species accounts of each of
the currently recognized species of suids and tayassuids. Each
account is prepared by a specialist or team of collaborators with
particular expertise for that species. Each account contains the
following sections: names, taxonomy, subspecies and distribu-
tion, descriptive notes, habitat, movements and home range,
activity patterns, feeding ecology, reproduction and growth,
behaviour, parasites and diseases, status in the wild, status in
captivity, acknowledgements and references. Discerning read-
ers will note some similarity to the arrangement of species
accounts found in Volume 2 of the Handbook of Mammals of
the World (Lynx Edicions, 2011). This is a good thing, as we have
learned a considerable amount about some of these species in
the six years since the publication of that volume. Although
Parts I and III of this book may well be read in their entirety by
many readers, the species accounts more likely will provide easy
access to information about one or more particular species of
interest. Having this information gathered into a single source
will be helpful to a wide variety of readers.
Part III focuses on conservation and management of wild
pigs and peccaries. Chapter 26, by Alexine Keuroghlian, Rafael.