On the island of Papua, the indigenous population raised small and skinny oceanic pigs (Sus Papuenis) as their primary livestock for thousands of years. This practice of pig farming would remain highly sacred, as pigs were not only a source of meat but were also used for rituals and symbols of status. While the pig remained highly valued amongst Papuans, the oceanic pig never migrated to Australia where they were unknown by the Aboriginals before the arrival of Europeans. But what if in another world, a decent population of pigs managed to make their way to the great southern continent by island hopping or hitching a ride with some lost travellers. How would this affect the Aboriginals and their eventual contact with European explorers?
WI: Pigs in Aboriginal Australia
- Thread starter Kerguelen
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It might give them some sort of immunity to Old World diseases, thus leading to an overall stronger Aboriginal resistance to colonization, whether it be from the British or others.
The immunity is likely to be pretty local, unless pig farming somehow spreads across the whole continent.
A bunch of native animals become endangered by the presence of antipodean piggies.
I wonder if a lot of the way to achieve a stronger Aboriginal civilisation is more links with Papua, which by necessity will be facilitated via the Torres Strait Islanders. Unfortunately, it appears like Lowland Papua was later to develop than Highland Papua, probably because the highlands are so damn rugged and fragmented into numerous valleys.
The introduction of pigs would leave a huge mark in both the natural environment (all those extinctions) and in the human environment, since this messes with ecosystems and also gives a new animal to the Aboriginals to either raise or hunt. Pigs being raised (and some will be feral) will mean more sedentary lifestyles are desirable so you might see cultures in Queensland (and eventually elsewhere) adopting a lifestyle like coastal Papuan groups like those of Kiwai Island.
Now, if we have a true Papuan exchange, the Torres Strait Islanders could get a few domesticated plants and perhaps better seafaring tech (more fishing) which would be very helpful for the Aboriginals. Perhaps they'd be more numerous and more structured and be able to resist colonialism at least as well as the Amerindians did.
The introduction of pigs would leave a huge mark in both the natural environment (all those extinctions) and in the human environment, since this messes with ecosystems and also gives a new animal to the Aboriginals to either raise or hunt. Pigs being raised (and some will be feral) will mean more sedentary lifestyles are desirable so you might see cultures in Queensland (and eventually elsewhere) adopting a lifestyle like coastal Papuan groups like those of Kiwai Island.
Now, if we have a true Papuan exchange, the Torres Strait Islanders could get a few domesticated plants and perhaps better seafaring tech (more fishing) which would be very helpful for the Aboriginals. Perhaps they'd be more numerous and more structured and be able to resist colonialism at least as well as the Amerindians did.
Even if they're just wild pigs, thousands of years (assuming the introduction is around the time of the dingo's introduction) is enough time to get a lot of natural selection toward a big, tough hog with plenty of meat on it. Also, more pigs means more protein, which means more food for dogs, which means the Aboriginals would have reason to tame the dingo to use as a pack animal, hunting animal, etc. So even if the pigs aren't tame they'll be useful.
Feral pigs are widespread in Papua and intensively hunted, for Papuan farmers wild pigs are pests, for Aboriginal Australian hunters they'll be just game.
Okay so reviving I'm this WI for just a second since I've managed to gain access to a document called "Pre-Cookian Pigs in Australia?" by James A. Baldwin which discusses the possibility that Torres Strait Islanders may have introduced pigs to Australia sometime before Europeans properly explored the region during the turn of the 19th century.
In it, Mr. Baldwin details how edible plants such as the giant taro were found to have been introduced to Australia by the Islanders although the aborigines of the continent didn't know how to farm it and mostly gathered taro. This, combined with the tradition of pigs being traded across Melanesia due to their high value (as mentioned in the OP), it is likely that a population of Papuan pigs could've established a population on the favorable climes of Queensland. Mr. Baldwin then points to five pieces of evidence being.
1. Depictions of pigs in Aboriginal rock art on Cape York of unknown age (with the straight tails and large forequarters depicted being indicative of Papuan breeds)
2. The presence of a Papuan parasite called gnathostoma hispidum in the stomachs of Cape York pigs but absent outside of other Australian pig populations
3. The small size of Cape York pigs and the presence of "longitudinal stripes", which emerge in feral pig populations with the exception of descendants of European domestic pigs
4. The most damning piece of evidence, Lamalama-speakers on the Cape York Peninsula using kurpanam, nyapanam and arpanam to refer to pigs, believed to have originated from the Torres Straiter word for pig, borom. This is in sharp contrast to other aboriginal words for pig, being pigipigi or bigibig, with clear origins in the English language.
While certainly informative, none of this proves that sus scrofa papuenis was introduced to Cape York before the journey of Captain Cook, instead serving to disprove previous theories that the feral pig population of the peninsula was first introduced by European explorers as a source of food for lost travelers. Although we cannot say for certain when pigs arrived in Queensland, it does prove the feasibility of Papuan pigs establishing a successful population in pre-colonial Australia. This leads to the next question, how would these adventurous hogs affect history as we know it?
As others on the thread have stated, simply because an animal can be domesticated doesn't mean it will be. Although Australia has plenty of domesticatable crops which @Jared detailed in his excellent timeline Lands of Red and Gold, the issue is that the continent lacks a native "founder crop" that would make a sedentary lifestyle more attractive than that of a hunter-gatherer, allowing them to domesticate more plants and animals alike. IOTL, pigs are one of the most destructive invasive species in Queensland and ITTL, they would've likely reduced the abundance of staple crops in the region such as the pencil yam which Aboriginal Queenslanders relied on for millennia.
This appetite means that pigs tend to be comparatively high-maintenance animals, making it for people to tame them. Not even the peoples of southern Papua could fully domesticate their prized pigs IOTL, loosely managing them in what Baldwin describes as a system of "semi-domestication". Less restricted by the near-impassable Papuan interior, it is possible that this system of semi-domestication could've been adopted in eastern Australia and spread to the more fertile south. Even the wild pig population would affect the Aborigines in significant ways, perhaps causing them to re-domesticate the dingo to hunt down more porkchops for dinner (hunting feral pigs using dogs is also a recreational activity in modern Australia weirdly enough). I'm unsure how these changes would've affected Aboriginal Australia and their eventual contact with European traders but if any of you have any ideas, I'm all ears!
In it, Mr. Baldwin details how edible plants such as the giant taro were found to have been introduced to Australia by the Islanders although the aborigines of the continent didn't know how to farm it and mostly gathered taro. This, combined with the tradition of pigs being traded across Melanesia due to their high value (as mentioned in the OP), it is likely that a population of Papuan pigs could've established a population on the favorable climes of Queensland. Mr. Baldwin then points to five pieces of evidence being.
1. Depictions of pigs in Aboriginal rock art on Cape York of unknown age (with the straight tails and large forequarters depicted being indicative of Papuan breeds)
2. The presence of a Papuan parasite called gnathostoma hispidum in the stomachs of Cape York pigs but absent outside of other Australian pig populations
3. The small size of Cape York pigs and the presence of "longitudinal stripes", which emerge in feral pig populations with the exception of descendants of European domestic pigs
4. The most damning piece of evidence, Lamalama-speakers on the Cape York Peninsula using kurpanam, nyapanam and arpanam to refer to pigs, believed to have originated from the Torres Straiter word for pig, borom. This is in sharp contrast to other aboriginal words for pig, being pigipigi or bigibig, with clear origins in the English language.
While certainly informative, none of this proves that sus scrofa papuenis was introduced to Cape York before the journey of Captain Cook, instead serving to disprove previous theories that the feral pig population of the peninsula was first introduced by European explorers as a source of food for lost travelers. Although we cannot say for certain when pigs arrived in Queensland, it does prove the feasibility of Papuan pigs establishing a successful population in pre-colonial Australia. This leads to the next question, how would these adventurous hogs affect history as we know it?
As others on the thread have stated, simply because an animal can be domesticated doesn't mean it will be. Although Australia has plenty of domesticatable crops which @Jared detailed in his excellent timeline Lands of Red and Gold, the issue is that the continent lacks a native "founder crop" that would make a sedentary lifestyle more attractive than that of a hunter-gatherer, allowing them to domesticate more plants and animals alike. IOTL, pigs are one of the most destructive invasive species in Queensland and ITTL, they would've likely reduced the abundance of staple crops in the region such as the pencil yam which Aboriginal Queenslanders relied on for millennia.
This appetite means that pigs tend to be comparatively high-maintenance animals, making it for people to tame them. Not even the peoples of southern Papua could fully domesticate their prized pigs IOTL, loosely managing them in what Baldwin describes as a system of "semi-domestication". Less restricted by the near-impassable Papuan interior, it is possible that this system of semi-domestication could've been adopted in eastern Australia and spread to the more fertile south. Even the wild pig population would affect the Aborigines in significant ways, perhaps causing them to re-domesticate the dingo to hunt down more porkchops for dinner (hunting feral pigs using dogs is also a recreational activity in modern Australia weirdly enough). I'm unsure how these changes would've affected Aboriginal Australia and their eventual contact with European traders but if any of you have any ideas, I'm all ears!
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@Kerguelen: this I find interesting. Pigs in farming communities in temperate climates are relatively not high maintenance. Since they also can be fed leftovers. In the wild it can of course be different in areas, where food is more scarce.
Could plant domestication develop from gatherers having to figure out pig proof fences for when they aren't around?
I don’t think so, most likely they’d end up relying on other sources of food like the pigs themselves or just move to an area with fewer pigs tearing up the ecosystem
The dingos going fully feral is a post-colonization phenomenon to my knowledge, the population collapse resulted in a lot of wild dogs and with fewer human there were more prey for the dogs.
That sounds unlikely to me, surely there must have been permanent feral dingo communities coexisting alongside domestic ones, AFAIK feral dogs existed even in far more densely populated places and pre-colonial Australia was hardly a densely populated region even taking into account the climate(0.05-0.2 people/km2)
It’s believed that dingos started out as domesticated dogs introduced to Australia by migrants from India 4000 years ago
4000 seems too recent, this study claims they arrived around 8300 years ago:
Genomic regions under selection in the feralization of the dingoes - Nature Communications
Dingoes evolved in isolation from both their domesticated and wild ancestors. Here, the authors investigate the genomic basis of the feralization of dingoes and trace their origin to domestic dogs that migrated to Australia approximately 8300 years ago.
www.nature.com
Also the study points at very deep/basal diversity in Australian canids which makes the theory that they are recently feralized dogs extremely unlikely, simply speaking dogs spread far and wide and became very diverse so certain groups could have been half-domesticated or mostly feral for millennia.
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twovultures
Donor
IMO pigs would be seriously disruptive to the Aboriginal way of life. They would compete with hunter-gatherers for sometimes scarce food, potentially causing localized famines in the decades after they are introduced. The Aboriginal peoples could adapt by increasing their hunting of pigs, and especially targeting pregnant sows for slaughter. The pig could be kept outside of Aboriginal food taboos, with no restrictions on hunting times/locations which would exist for other, native animals that have value as totems for Aboriginal peoples.
Another possible reaction to this disruption is to adopt agriculture from New Guinea, to grow your own crops so you don't have to compete with pigs for gathering wild ones. The New Guinea crop package of taro, bananas (maybe yams, as well?) is limited on where it can be grown in Australia. Basically the east coast from Cape York to the Coff Coast, and Elcho Island to Kununurra on the top end, are where IMO this crop package could be grown. But it can't really be grown in any inland area (aside from *maybe* the Darling Downs) or any of the temperate coastal areas in the south.