…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”
Very carefully, I would imagine.
WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…
…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…
…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…
…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest - I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?
…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…
…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…
…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford, more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in the first a molet argent.
After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford was on the winning side…
And pigs will definitely eat people.
It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.
More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).
Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…
…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…
