Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Despite not exactly being world-renowned swimmers, pigs have spread across the Asia-Pacific region for thousands of years. But how? With the genetic and archeological data from over 700 pigs, a team of scientists documented how people helped the mammals make their way across thousands of miles. Their findings are detailed in a study recently published in the journal Science. “This research reveals what happens when people transport animals enormous distances, across one of the world’s most fundamental natural boundaries,” evolutionary geneticist and study co-author author Dr. David Stanton of the University of Cardiff and Queen Mary University of London said in a statement. “These movements led to pigs with a melting pot of ancestries. These patterns were technically very difficult to disentangle, but have ultimately helped us understand how and why animals came to be distributed across the Pacific islands.” Crossing the Wallace Line Previously, plants and animals did not always naturally spread across Indonesia’s over 17,000 separate islands. In the …