Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Pigs In The Pacific Prove the Bible is Wrong

Prehistoric cave painting of two Sulawesi warty pigs, Leang Tedongnge Cave, Sulawesi, Indonesia. At least 45,000 years old, this is among the world’s oldest known cave art and illustrates the long-standing relationship between pigs and people in the region

Adam Brumm (Griffith University) and Adhi Agus Oktaviana (BRIN, Indonesia).

How people moved pigs across the Pacific | EurekAlert!

A new study, published today in the journal Science, reveals how millennia of human migration across the Pacific islands led to the widespread introduction of pigs throughout the Asia–Pacific region, creating what are now invasive populations.

The research was led by Laurent Frantz, Professor of Palaeogenomics at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU), together with David Stanton of Cardiff University and Greger Larson of the University of Oxford.

The study documents a long history of deliberate pig transport between islands in South-East Asia and Polynesia, extending back as far as 50,000 years ago on the island of Sulawesi — some 40,000 years before creationists believe the universe itself existed.

Comparing this abundant and ever-expanding body of evidence for an ancient Earth — one already inhabited by modern humans migrating out of Africa and dispersing across the globe over the last 100,000 years — with the biblical timeline that compresses all of human history into a few thousand years should be straightforward. The conclusion is unavoidable: the evidence comprehensively refutes the Bible’s origin myths.

Yet creationists remain committed to demonstrating that no facts, however compelling or indisputable, can change their minds. In that worldview, changing one’s mind is treated as a weakness. The result is an escalating creativity in dismissing inconvenient evidence, clinging to easily refuted beliefs, and increasingly invoking vast conspiracies — involving every working scientist, their staff, journal publishers, universities, and research institutes — all supposedly colluding to undermine biblical literalism.

Origins and domestication of pigs.

Central European wild boar, Sus scrofa scrofa

By Valentin Panzirsch - Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Map depicting Southeast Asia, as the origin of suid species (Sus scrofa, Sus celebensis, Sus verrucosus, Sus barbatus, Sus philippensis and Sus cebifrons), and the current geographic distribution of wild boar.

Ramos-Onsins, S., Burgos-Paz, W., Manunza, A. et al.(2014)

Domestic pigs descend from the wild boar, Sus scrofa, one of the most geographically widespread large mammals prior to human influence. Wild boar ranged naturally across much of Eurasia and North Africa, occupying forests, woodlands, and mixed environments. Their omnivorous diet, intelligence, high fertility, and tolerance of human-disturbed habitats made them particularly well suited to domestication.

Multiple, independent domestications

Unlike many domestic animals that appear to have a single centre of origin, pigs were domesticated independently in multiple regions:

East Asia (China) – as early as ~9,000 years ago, with clear archaeological and genetic evidence for local domestication.
Anatolia and the Near East – around the same time, associated with early Neolithic farming communities.
Secondary domestications occurred as domestic pigs spread into Europe and interbred repeatedly with local wild boar populations.

Genetic studies show that early European domestic pigs initially carried Near Eastern ancestry but were later almost completely replaced by genes from European wild boar through repeated hybridisation. This makes pigs one of the clearest examples of domestication as an ongoing evolutionary process, not a single historical event.

How pigs were domesticated

Pig domestication was probably opportunistic rather than deliberate at first:

Wild boar scavenged around human settlements.
Less aggressive individuals tolerated proximity to humans.
Humans began managing, feeding, and selectively breeding them.
Over time, traits such as reduced aggression, faster growth, and increased fertility were favoured.

This pathway resembles commensal domestication seen in animals such as dogs and chickens, rather than controlled capture and breeding from the outset.

Spread with humans

As humans migrated, pigs travelled with them:

Across Europe, pigs spread with Neolithic farmers and later Iron Age cultures.
Into Island South-East Asia and the Pacific, pigs were transported deliberately by seafaring peoples.
In Polynesia, pigs became part of tightly managed subsistence systems, often isolated on islands, leading to distinct genetic lineages.

Because pigs do not swim long distances and cannot raft naturally between islands, their presence on remote islands is unambiguous evidence of human-mediated transport.

Genetic and archaeological evidence

Modern pig genetics strongly support this complex history:

Mitochondrial DNA reveals multiple domestication centres.
Nuclear DNA shows extensive introgression from wild populations.
Archaeological remains show size reduction, tooth shape changes, and demographic profiles consistent with human management.

Together, these lines of evidence demonstrate that pig domestication reflects deep time, repeated migration, and continuous interaction between humans and animals.

Why this matters

The domestication history of pigs directly contradicts ideas of:

a recent origin of agriculture,
a single post-Flood dispersal of animals,
or a static, unchanging human past.

Instead, pigs document tens of thousands of years of human movement, ecological manipulation, and evolutionary change — precisely what archaeology, genetics, and evolutionary biology predict, and exactly what biblical literalism cannot accommodate.

The findings of the research team are explained in a news release from Queen Mary University of London, issued through EurekAlert!.

How people moved pigs across the Pacific
Genomic study reveals the routes taken by people as they island hopped across Indonesia
A new study, published today in the journal Science, reveals how millennia of human migration across Pacific islands led to the introduction of invasive pig species all over the Asia-Pacific region.

The study was led by Laurent Frantz, Professor of Palaeogenomics at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU), David Stanton, from Cardiff University, and Greger Larson, from the University of Oxford.

Plants and animals have not always spread naturally across the islands of Indonesia. The evolutionary biologist Alfred Russell Wallace identified a major biogeographic boundary, the “Wallace Line”, noting that wildlife on either side rarely crossed. Leopards and monkeys, for example, are found on the Asian side, while marsupials and cassowaries are largely limited to the Australasian side.

One notable exception is pigs. Pig populations occur on both sides of the Wallace Line and extend across Southeast Asia to New Caledonia, Vanuatu and remote Polynesia. Pigs are highly effective ecological invaders, and they are also culturally important across the region, raising a key question: what role did people play in their spread?

The new paper looked at the genome of over 700 pigs, including from living and archaeological specimens. This allowed the reconstruction of their movement across southeast Asia and identify when they arrived on certain islands and how they might have interbred with various native pig species.

The researchers found that people of different cultures have moved pig species in the region for millennia. The earliest evidence points to people living in Sulawesi perhaps as early as 50,000 years ago, known to be the earliest cave painters, who both depicted and transported warty pig species as far away as Timor, possibly to establish future hunting stock.

Prehistoric cave painting of two Sulawesi warty pigs, Leang Tedongnge Cave, Sulawesi, Indonesia. At least 45,000 years old, this is among the world’s oldest known cave art and illustrates the long-standing relationship between pigs and people in the region.

Adam Brumm (Griffith University) and Adhi Agus Oktaviana (BRIN, Indonesia).

The introduction of pigs in Island Southeast Asia dramatically accelerated, around 4,000 years ago, when early agricultural communities transported domestic pigs in the region. Their journey began from Taiwan, extending across the Philippines, northern Indonesia (Maluku), into Papua New Guinea, and on to the outlying islands as far as Vanuatu, and remote Polynesia. The authors also found evidence for the introduction of pigs from Europe during the colonial period.

Many of these domestic pigs escaped, and became feral, in some cases, like on the Komodo islands, hybridising with the warty pigs brought by people from Sulawesi thousands of years earlier. These hybrid pigs are now a major source of food for the endangered Komodo dragons.

The findings of this study highlight the dramatic and enduring impact of human activity on local ecosystems in the Pacific, raising conservation conundrums. Pigs in the region today have dramatically different statuses and impacts across islands: some are considered spiritual beings, others pests, while some are now so ingrained in local ecosystems that they could almost be considered native. Efficient conservation policy will need to navigate these complexities, going beyond the traditional paradigm of conserving only native fauna.

The study included collaborators from around the world, with more than 50 authors being involved, including scientists from Cardiff University, the University of Oxford, the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia, National Museum of the Philippines, and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.

It is very exciting that we can use ancient DNA from pigs to peel back layers of human activity across this megabiodiverse region. The big question now is, at what point do we consider something native? What if people introduced species tens of thousands of years age, are these worth conservation efforts?

Professor Laurent Frantz, senior author
School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
London, UK.

This research reveals what happens when people transport animals enormous distances, across one of the world’s most fundamental natural boundaries. These movements led to pigs with a melting pot of ancestries. These patterns were technically very difficult to disentangle, but have ultimately helped us understand how and why animals came to be distributed across the Pacific islands.

Dr. David Stanton, lead author
School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
London, UK.

Wild boar dispersed across all of Eurasia and North Africa and certainly don’t need people to help them disperse into new areas. When people have landed a hand, pigs were all too willing to spread out on newly colonised islands in South East Asia and into the Pacific. By sequencing the genomes of ancient and more recent populations we’ve been able to link those human-assisted dispersals to specific human populations in both space and time.

Professor Greger Larson, co-corresponding author.
Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network
Research Laboratory for Archaeology and History of Art
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK.

Publication:
David W. G. Stanton et al.
Genomic and morphometric evidence for Austronesian-mediated pig translocation in the Pacific.
Science 391, eadv4963 (2026). DOI:10.1126/science.adv4963

Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Humans have long moved animal species beyond their native ranges, drastically altering ecosystems, especially on islands. The translocation of vertebrates eastward across the Wallace Line into Wallacea, a biogeographic region between the Asian and Australasian biotas, has had major environmental impacts. For example, although the natural range of the genus Sus (pigs) is primarily located in Eurasia and Western Indonesia, free-living pigs are now widespread in Wallacea.

RATIONALE

The human-mediated translocation of pigs east of the Wallace Line most likely began with S. celebensis, a species native to Sulawesi, in pre-Neolithic times >4000 years ago. S. scrofa (the ancestor of modern domestic pigs) populations were also likely introduced east of the Wallace Line between 4000 and 3000 years ago during the expansion of Austronesian speakers from mainland East Asia and Taiwan, through the Philippines and northern Wallacea, into Melanesia and Polynesia. The geographic origin and ancestry of these populations from Wallacea and Oceania, however, remain unknown.

To establish the geographic origins of the pig populations in Wallacea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia and the potential dispersal routes along which they traveled alongside people, we sequenced 119 Sus nuclear genomes (including 63 historical and ancient genomes) and generated geometric morphometric data (from the third lower molar) from 401 modern and 307 archaeological individuals.

RESULTS

Ancestry analyses based on ancestry deconvolution, a process by which specific ancestries in admixed individuals can be identified and isolated using local ancestry inference, highlighted multiple pig-dispersal processes in Wallacea. The initial dispersal was a natural and/or human-mediated translocation of Island Southeast Asian endemic pigs from Java (S. verrucosus) into present-day Bali. The indigenous suid on Sulawesi, S. celebensis, then dispersed over water to the Lesser Sunda Islands, including Flores and Timor, potentially as a result of hunter-gatherer translocations more than 4000 years ago.

More recently, domestic S. scrofa pigs from southern China and the Philippines were introduced across most islands of Wallacea and Oceania sometime after 3500 to 3000 years ago. Many of these introduced pigs later became feral on islands across the region. Finally, during the colonial period, pigs with European ancestry were introduced broadly across the region, including in the Lesser Sundas and Papua New Guinea.

CONCLUSION

Our results demonstrate that non-native free-living pigs east of the Wallace Line have a complex ancestry that primarily reflects multiple intentional introductions by people. The most important of these events was the migration of Austronesian-speaking groups, ~4000 years ago, who moved from Southeast China and Taiwan via the Philippines and introduced domestic pigs across a vast geographical region from the Philippines to Hawai‘i, many of which became feral.

Map showing the dispersal of pigs into Wallacea, including deliberate introductions by people in Wallacea and the Pacific.
The numbers (1–4) on the arrows indicate the chronological order of these dispersal events, as per our analysis.

Abstract

Several millennia of human-mediated translocation of non-native pig species (genus Sus) to the islands of Wallacea and Oceania have considerably altered local ecosystems. To investigate the timing and trajectory of these introductions, we conducted both genomic analyses of 576 pig nuclear genomes and a geometric morphometric analysis of 708 modern and ancient dental remains. Our analyses demonstrate that free-living and domestic pigs in Wallacea and Oceania have diverse ancestries resulting from the introduction of multiple sequential pig populations followed by gene flow. Despite the variability in their genomic ancestry, these pigs all have a distinct tooth morphology as well as a genetic link to the Chinese domestic pig populations that accompanied the dispersal of Austronesian language speakers ~4000 to 3000 years ago via Taiwan and the Philippines.

Fig. 1. Genomic and morphometric variation.

(A) Map of sampling locations. Red triangles indicate 49 newly sequenced historical S. scrofa specimens (dating between 1871 and 1994) from ISEA (cataloged as S. scrofa in museum collections) and three archaeological specimens from the Philippines (~1500 CE), Palau (Micronesia; ~672 CE), and the Lapita culture site of Teouma on Efate Island, Vanuatu. Gray dots represent individual S. scrofa genomes (some of which are newly sequenced; see data S1) from mainland Asia (both South Asia and East Asia). The locations of the ISEA-endemic Sus species individual genomes analyzed in this study are noted in lilac (S. barbatus; Borneo), maroon (S. cebifrons), orange (S. celebensis), and green (S. verrucosus). (B) Mitochondrial analysis. Geographic distribution of major mtDNA haplogroups based on data from ~705 control regions and ~323 whole mitochondrial genome data. The tree on the right is a schematic representation illustrating the phylogenetic relationships between these major haplogroups. The complete phylogenetic tree, based on whole mitochondrial genome data, is available in fig. S3. This figure illustrates the distribution of the red dots, representing the Pacific Clade, extending west of the Wallace Line into Western Indonesia, the Philippines, and mainland Asia (as shown in the full mitogenome tree). (C) Morphometric analysis. This neighbor-joining network illustrates the morphometric similarities in third lower molar (m3) shape among S. scrofa and ISEA-endemic Sus species, based on Mahalanobis distances. The network was generated following a discriminant analysis that used the first 15 principal components from a preceding PCA. These selected components explain 88.7% of the total shape variance and were chosen to maximize the morphological distinctions between the groups. The tooth outlines shown represent the mean shape for each population, derived from separate superimposition analyses. (D) This PCA [see (A) for labels], based on pseudohaploid genotype from >500 individuals, illustrates the genetic variation among Eurasian S. scrofa and ISEA-endemic Sus species. PC1 clearly separates the ISEA-endemic Sus species from S. scrofa individuals, whereas PC2 distinguishes between European and Asian S. scrofa. The red triangles (S. scrofa genomes from ISEA) are scattered across PC1 and PC2, reflecting their complex ancestry, which includes contributions from Asian and European S. scrofa as well as ISEA-endemic Sus ancestry.

Fig. 2. Ancestry of pigs inferred using ADMIXTURE and D statistics.

The ancestry of each individual Asian pig in our dataset was decomposed into five components using a combination of supervised ADMIXTURE analysis and D statistics. Initially, the ancestry was decomposed with K = 3 in ADMIXTURE (see fig. S6), representing European S. scrofa, Asian S. scrofa, and ISEA-endemic Sus ancestry. The ISEA-endemic Sus ancestry component was further resolved using D statistics (see supplementary materials). Each pie chart on the figure represents a sampling location, and its size is proportional to the number of samples from that location.

David W. G. Stanton et al.
Genomic and morphometric evidence for Austronesian-mediated pig translocation in the Pacific.
Science 391, eadv4963 (2026). DOI:10.1126/science.adv4963

Copyright: © 2026 The authors.
Published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Taken together, the origins and domestication history of pigs expose a gulf between evidence-based history and biblical origin myths that cannot be bridged by reinterpretation or metaphor. Pigs were being actively managed, transported, and genetically reshaped by human populations tens of thousands of years before the Bible’s timeline even allows a universe to exist, let alone complex human societies capable of long-distance migration and animal husbandry.

The biblical narrative requires a world in which all animals were created simultaneously a few thousand years ago and later redistributed from a single location after a global flood. Yet the pig record shows something entirely different: multiple independent domestications, repeated hybridisation with local wild populations, and regionally distinct genetic lineages accumulating over immense spans of time. There is no bottleneck, no universal reset, and no trace of a recent, global dispersal event.

Equally damaging to biblical literalism is the sheer mundanity of the process. Pig domestication was not a sudden act of design or divine instruction, but a messy, opportunistic, and ongoing interaction between humans and animals, driven by ecology, behaviour, and natural selection. It is precisely the sort of untidy, historically contingent process that mythological origin stories fail to anticipate and cannot explain.

A further problem for the biblical claim that animals were created “for” mankind is that pigs — like almost all domesticated species — are manifestly not fit for human use in their natural state. Wild boar are aggressive, dangerous, slow to fatten, and poorly suited to confinement. Making them useful required thousands of years of human intervention: selecting for docility, altered growth rates, body shape, fertility, and behaviour. That prolonged process of trial, error, and selective breeding is exactly what one would expect from fallible humans adapting wild animals to their needs — and exactly what one would not expect if an omniscient god had designed animals for human use from the outset.

In short, pigs are yet another quiet but devastating witness against biblical creationism. Their bones, genomes, and global distribution tell a story of deep time, migration, and evolution that unfolds exactly as modern science predicts — and in a way that flatly contradicts the compressed timelines and magical resets of the Bible’s origin myths.

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