The finding, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature Communications, is significant because the people living in that part of Europe at the time were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who primarily lived off of wild game.

These people, known as the Ertebølle culture, kept domesticated dogs as hunting companions, but it would be several hundreds of years before they began raising animals and crops for food.

One hypothesis for how the Ertebølle came to acquire the pigs is that they traded for them with their farmer neighbors to the south.

"It would have been hard [for the hunter-gatherers] not to be fascinated by the strange-looking spotted pigs owned by farmers living nearby," study co-author Greger Larson, an archeologist at Durham University in