Jamaican jerk seasoning is believed to have been developed by escaped enslaved Coromantee Africans in Jamaica, but historians have unearthed evidence that jerked meat was cooked by the Tainos. When the British invaded Jamaica in 1655, the Spanish colonists fled, leaving behind a large number of African slaves. Rather than be re-enslaved by the British, they escaped into Jamaica's mountainous regions where they mixed with the local Taínos. It appears that these runaway slaves, who became the island's first Jamaican Maroons, learned this practice from the Tainos. It is speculated that while the Tainos developed the style of cooking and seasoning, the escaped African slaves introduced the marinade and the cooking pits. While all racial groups hunted the wild hog in the Jamaican interior, and used the practice of jerking to cook it in the seventeenth century, by the end of the eighteenth century most groups had switched to imported pork products. Only the Maroons continued the practice of hunting wild hogs and jerking the pork.