INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS RATHER EASY:

DNA clues to prehistoric pig-taming (The Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2005)

Mean-tempered, big-tusked wild boars were transformed thousands of years ago into floppy-eared domestic pigs not once or twice, but repeatedly in many parts of the world as humans abandoned foraging and hunting for a farming life.

In a report published Friday in the journal Science, researchers used DNA from wild boars and pigs to conclude that domestication of pigs occurred in at least seven places.

"The question is no longer where pigs were domesticated, but where pigs were not domesticated," said Greger Larson, at the University of Oxford and the paper's first author.

The surprisingly widespread origin of domestic pigs about 9,000 years ago is unusual in the history of animal domestication. Sheep, cows, horses and goats were traditionally thought to have been domesticated just a handful of times during human farming history, mostly in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. Charles Darwin, among others, proposed that pigs were domesticated just twice - in Asia and the Near East - then transported by Neolithic migrants who carried their farming culture with them.