Guinea pigs are neither from Guinea nor related to pigs
The guinea pig is a South American rodent, first domesticated for food in the Andes as early as 5000 BC. How it got its misleading name nobody knows for sure. One popular story, that it once sold for a guinea coin, collapses on dates: William Harvey wrote of 'Ginny-pigs' a decade before that coin existed.
Cavia porcellus does not live in the wild at all. Skull studies and molecular markers suggest its most likely ancestor is the wild cavy Cavia tschudii. Andean peoples in what is now southern Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia raised it for meat thousands of years after they tamed llamas and alpacas. Known locally as cuy, from Quechua quwi, it appeared in Moche art, played a role in Inca religious ritual, and was selectively bred into many varieties between about 1200 and the Spanish conquest in 1532. Many highland households still raise it for food today.
European traders carried it home in the early 1500s, and it quickly became a fashionable pet among the elite, reportedly including Elizabeth I. A painting in London's National Portrait Gallery, dated to 1580, shows a girl in Elizabethan dress holding a tortoiseshell guinea pig, and a partial skeleton from Hill Hall in Essex dates to around 1575. Evidence suggests South American migrants had already brought the animals to the West Indies around 500 BC.
The 'guinea' may reflect a route through Guinea, a garbling of Guiana, or old English slang for any distant land. The 'pig' part probably came from its big head, stout neck, tailless rump, piggy squeals and appetite. Other languages lean the same way: German calls it a little sea pig, French an Indian pig, Chinese a pig mouse. Spanish breaks ranks with 'little rabbit of the Indies', and Japanese uses a word borrowed from the marmot, via Dutch traders who reached Nagasaki in 1843.
Heavy laboratory use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned 'guinea pig' into slang for any human test subject, though mice and rats have largely replaced them. Pets usually weigh 700 to 1,200 grams and live four to five years; Guinness recorded one reaching almost 15. Their front teeth never stop growing, so they chew constantly. In the wild, cavies graze grassland in small herds, most active at dawn and dusk.
Source: Guinea pig
