JERUSALEM — Israel may not be the most obvious place to study pigs, given that religious strictures in both Judaism and Islam forbid their consumption.

But Israeli researchers involved in a lengthy project whose goal is to reconstruct ancient Israel have now established that the pigs here are of European stock, unlike their Middle Eastern counterparts elsewhere in the region, and that they probably arrived with the non-kosher Philistines about 3,000 years ago.

In the highlands west of the Jordan River associated with the early Israelites, archaeological studies have shown there are almost no ancient pig bones. The exceptionally high number of pig bones found in the lowlands, at what were urban Philistine sites like Ashkelon and Ekron, has given rise to the theory that the Philistines, sea people who migrated here from the Aegean basin, brought their culinary and husbandry habits with them.

A new study based on DNA testing of modern and ancient pigs has revealed that the European emigrant pigs became prominent during the Iron Age, around 900 B.C., and eventually took over the entire wild boar population in the area that is now Israel.