Date of Award
1-18-2022
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
More than 10,000 years ago humans in multiple parts of Eurasia began to form increasingly more entangled and mutually dependent relationships with non-human animals. In some cases, the elaboration of these relationships would result in evolutionary change, resulting in biologically distinct or domesticated populations. The last several decades of research show that this process is ongoing and polymorphous, emerging out of sustained human-animal interactions that develop along historically contingent trajectories shaped by particular biological, environmental, and cultural contexts. Thus, understanding domestication as an evolutionary process necessitates investigation into species- and context-specific developmental trajectories of human-animal interaction. The pig (Sus scrofa) initiated this co-evolutionary journey independently at least twice—first in southeastern Anatolia by 10,000 BP and then in North China by 8,800 BP—providing a rare opportunity to examine the formation of human-animal mutualisms within geographically and culturally distinct contexts. However, although our understanding of the contingencies and processes responsible for initiating and impelling the development of these relationships in prehistory remains incomplete for both western and eastern Eurasia, the chronology of human behaviors and activities leading up to and characterizing early husbandry practices in Neolithic China are even less clear. Without this account our understanding of the human-animal and human-environmental interactions that give rise to evolutionary change is incomplete—limited by our present capacity to conduct globally comparative examinations of this process. In northeastern China, the Western Liao River Basin (WLRB) provides compelling evidence for an indigenous lineage of domestic swine originating from local S. scrofa populations. Representing an early Neolithic center of origin for millet cultivation—which forms the basis of agricultural economies throughout North China by the early Bronze Age—the WLRB represents a promising case study for examining the particular socioecological contexts and S. scrofa adaptive strategies that gave rise to domestic pigs in this region. This dissertation addresses the need for regionally specific and contextually sensitive documentary records of the human and S. scrofa activities and responses in the various places it unfolded through the implementation of a two-pronged research project. First, alongside a comprehensive survey of wild boar ecology, I compiled contemporary data on S. scrofa offtake assemblages resulting from four different predatory strategies to create a set of idealized demographic profiles for interpreting prey-acquisition strategies archaeologically. The results of this work not only represent the first analogically derived and quantifiably underwritten demographic models for this species, but also raise questions about those in use by zooarchaeologists today and invite further development of species-specific models grounded in actualistic data. In refining the zooarchaeological application of paleo-demographic models and integrating them with cross-disciplinary knowledge on S. scrofa life-history, reproduction, and diet this study further reveals a demographically detectable feedback loop between wild boar and human hunting and land-use activities causing demographic shifts in local populations likely to promote deepening human-S. scrofa partnerships down the line. Second, I apply the insights developed in the previous study to zooarchaeological assemblages from multiple sites in the Chifeng region to create a diachronic account of human-S. scrofa relationships in the WLRB. Here, I provide a new set of direct radiocarbon dates, mortality and survivorship data, and stable carbon and nitrogen isotopic data from the sites of Xinglongwa and Xinglonggou-I and combine these with available datasets from contemporary and later archaeological sites to reconstruct S. scrofa diets and human procurement strategies from the early Neolithic through the Bronze Age (ca. 8200 – 3600 BP). In addition to representing the most complete, diachronic account of human-S. scrofa interactions in this region to date, my findings highlight the role of domestic millets as part of a complex human-animal-plant feedback loop occurring within the context of co-created agroecological landscapes. Consequently, this dissertation proposes a new model for pig domestication in the WLRB, where the initial development of human-S. scrofa mutualisms was enabled by adaptations made by local wild boars as they opportunistically exploited anthropogenically managed plant resources.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Xinyi Liu
Committee Members
Fiona Marshall
Recommended Citation
Lemoine, Ximena, "Becoming with Pigs, Plants, and People: Examining the formation of human-animal mutualisms in Neolithic northeastern China" (2022). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3243.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3243