Fred ,'A Hole in the World'
[NAFDA] Spoilers for any and all currently running TV shows. All hardcore spoilage, all the time. No white font.
Actually European explorers and merchants used to seed islands with pigs as a way to set up a renewable, no-maintenance food source for later travels.
As for the polar bear, I'd say we have the options of scientific experimentation, riding a really big ice floe south, materializing from Walt's comic book, or a Coca Cola promotion gone horribly wrong.
Actually, the boar thing's the most likely of the lot. The folks who settled the Polynesian islands were big fans of the pork, and dragged pigs with them wherever they roamed. Pretty much any island in the South Pacific that ever had humans on, unless it's had a total ecological collapse, will have pigs on it.
Glad to have a sense-making explanation for the pigs, at least.
Though, you know, those aren't domesticated-type pigs. Those are wild boars. With tusks.
Easiest way to get "wild" boars is to leave domesticated pigs alone in the jungle for a few generations. Feral pigs are hard to tell from the original wild stock.
That brings up something... it just occurred to me to wonder what that herd of swine that Jesus drove the demon into was doing hanging around considering the Jewish strictures against pork. Belonged to occupying Roman forces, I guess?
Hmm, so from a certain point of view he could have been seen as a radical zooterrorist...
I did a quick Google, and it seems that both the wild and the domestic pig are Sus scrofa. So, you're right, they're not actually different species, as I had thought.
From what I understand, Roman era Judaea was considerably more polycultural than the scriptures give it credit for. The Israelite did an ass job of exterminating the pre-Israelite Canaanites and whatnot, and did an even worse job of keeping other tribes out of the area. They just didn't give them any press time in the Big Book O' Ancient Testifyin'. So, there woulda been any number of cultures without the porcine prohibition. There woulda also been quite a few not-particularly-devout Jews, what with the rampant Roman secularism and all that.
I'm voting Hurley is the one who wasn't on the plane. For no good reason but that I think that would be wicked cool. Plus, isn't he the one who's not getting a background episode, per the spoilers?
While ground-dwelling bees could be indiginous to a tropical island,
Speaking of insects, should we get up a pool to bet on who the first survivor to get malaria will be?