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would, of course, have had a close familiarity with the home ranges and daily routines of wild pigs, with their eating and sleeping habits. They would have known that a sow with her newly born piglets retires to a leafy nest and remains there for about a week or more before rejoining the group. They would have been wary of fierce males, always formidable adversaries, defending their young. Once the male was out of the way, young sows were easier prey, especially in their nests. Any sow can suckle piglets, so to kill the mother and then capture the piglets and take them back home would have been relatively easy. Once penned, young piglets are soon tamed, and bond readily with humans. These may—and one stresses the word
may
—have been the first farm animals of all, because they were easily controlled when young.
    Piglets are easy, but growing pigs are much harder to control than goats or sheep, especially the adult males, which can become dangerously aggressive. So we cannot be absolutely sure that the Hallan Çemi pigs were fully domesticated. Inhabitants of the settlement were certainly hunting pigs on a fairly large scale, but the bones from the site are an enigma in that they fall between the sizes of both wild and domestic forms. Unlike adult wild goats and sheep killed during hunting, 43 percent of the Hallan Çemi swine were slaughtered before they were a year old and 10 percent when they were less than six months. A strong eleven-to-four male bias dominated the culling—the pigs being slaughtered on site in the village rather than elsewhere—as with wild goats and sheep. Such data strongly hint at domestication, or at least systematic management, for tamed pigs have many advantages. They are fecund and fertile, grow fast, and produce protein more rapidly than other domesticated animals. But being difficult to control, they might have made a poor choice of farm animal, especially for people collecting or growing cereal crops such as wheat and barley, which pigs targeted voraciously.
    We know from modern experience across the world that there are some relatively easy ways to manage pigs. 2 One is to let the animals roam freely, visiting them only occasionally. Another is to allow them free range during the day, then drive them back to the settlement at night. In both instances, the corralled pigs have contact with wild groups and with their boars, even if their loyalties now lie elsewhere and their diet is somewhat changed. As time went on, the people may have kept sows and their young but acquired new stock by allowing these to breed in the wild. Why would they have done this? These were difficult times throughout Southwest Asia, when droughts were devastating nut crops after centuries of abundance during which human populations rose. Deer and other game became scarcer as people competed for food, so to corral young pigs and find some way of increasing the food supply as a form of risk management may have made sense. The Hallan Çemi bones reveal systematic killing of the young, mostly of males, as if culling of surplus breeding animals were commonplace, presumably for meat. But were these domesticated animals or merely closely managed beasts that were still partially in the wild?
    We may never know, for there are limits to what fragmentary pig bones can tell us. Some tantalizing clues come from the other side of the world, from traditional pig management practices in highland and lowland New Guinea, where pig husbandry has been a central part of subsistence economies for many centuries. 3 The New Guineans manage pig reproduction in a variety of ways, but captive pigs are often the progeny of wild boars and domestic sows, with the surplus males being castrated. Breeding tame sows with wild boars would have been easier in earlier times than it is today, when agriculture was less intensified and more forested land was close at hand. Crossing domesticated boars and sows with no contact with the wild