Between 6000-4000 years ago (according to study published in Nature Communications), indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers acquired pigs from Neolithic farmers immigrating to Europe. I have been interested in Pleistocene pigs for a while (and their continued association with humans into the Holocene). The reason for my interest is that pigs produce a lot of androstenone (a sex steroid), especially males, and humans vary in their genotypic/phenotypic perception of androstenone.
Human variation in androstenone perception depends on two non synonymous SNPs (Keller et al. 2007), R88W and T133M. These SNPs appear to play a role in meat preference: Lunde et al. (2012) found that wild type humans (RT/RT) rated the meat of non-castrated male pigs less favorably than those with variant alleles (RT/WM and WM/WM). HapMap and 1000 Genomes are great resources but do not capture the variation local human populations, let alone the anthropological underpinnings of variation. In my lab and using a wide mix of global human populations, I found significant variation in androstenone perception frequencies, with higher frequencies of mutations throughout Eurasia–an area heavily invested in pig meat throughout human prehistory; in Japanese and Northern Europeans, the frequency of homozygote recessive mutations is much higher and these areas have a rich history with pigs–especially Japan.
Currently, I am working through the archaeological data for human-pig interaction in Europe and Asia (with a special focus on Asia as the origin of all pigs–see here and here for starting places) to interpret the results of the genetic data. Both the archaeological data and genetic data are thin when taken across such a huge space but they are a starting point; a neat study would be to find a locale with a rich archaeological record, human population to test for the gene and perception, and a good ethnohistory on the relationship with pigs–something I am working on right now.
Combining data from the archaeological record and the genetic history of human populations adds depth to what could, on their own, be interesting but uncontextual datasets. Taken together, these datasets can paint a more detailed picture of the evolutionary inter-relationship between genes and diet.
The Smell of Evolution 