Among the most surprising finds is that the inhabitants of the earliest cities of the Bronze Age (3500–1200 b.c.) were enthusiastic pig eaters, and that even later Iron Age (1200–586 b.c.) residents of Jerusalem enjoyed the occasional pork feast. Yet despite a wealth of data and new techniques including ancient DNA analysis, archaeologists still wrestle with many porcine mysteries, including why the once plentiful animal gradually became scarce long before religious taboos were enacted...In the 1990s, at the site of Hallan Çemi in southeastern Anatolia, archaeologists unearthed 51,000 animal bones dating to about 10,000 b.c. Of these, boar bones made...