European hunter-gatherers may have started farming practices far sooner than anyone expected. Archaeologists have uncovered the interaction between hunter-gatherer and farming communities, revealing that less-stationary groups of people may have acquired pigs from farmers as early as 4,600 BC.

Between 6,000 and 4,000 BC, animals and plants spread throughout Europe. Yet this wouldn't have been possible without the complex interplay between indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and incoming Neolithic farmers. Yet the scale of this interaction has been hotly debated by researchers for years.

"Mesolithic hunter-gatherers definitely had dogs, but they did not practice agriculture and did not have pigs, sheep, goats or cows, all of which were introduced to Europe with incoming farmers about 6000 BC," said Ben Krause-Kyora, the lead author of the new study, in a news release. "Having people who practiced a very different survival strategy nearby must have been odd, and we know now that the hunter-gatherers possessed some of the farmers' domesticated pigs."

In this latest study, the researchers examined the possibility of hunter-gatherers gaining domestic pigs. They analyzed the DNA from the bones and teeth of 63 pigs from Northern Germany. This showed them that hunter-gatherers acquired domesticated pigs of varying size and coat color.

That said, the researchers are still unsure whether the hunter-gatherers received the pigs through trade or by hunting and capturing escaped animals. Yet it's likely that the different colored and spotted coats that domesticated pigs would have possessed would have attracted the hunter-gatherers.

"Humans love novelty, and though hunter-gatherers exploited wild boar, it would have been hard not to be fascinated by the strange-looking spotted pigs owned by farmers living nearby," said Greger Larson, co-author of the new study, in a news release. "It should come as no surprise that the hunter-gatherers acquired some eventually, but this study shows that they did very soon after the domestic pigs arrived in northern Europe."

The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.