Agricultural Origins from the Ground Up: Archaeological Approaches to Plant Domestication (original) (raw)
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PNAS
Recent increases in archaeobotanical evidence offer insights into the processes of plant domestication and agricultural origins, which evolved in parallel in several world regions. Many different crop species underwent convergent evolution and acquired domestication syndrome traits. For a growing number of seed crop species, these traits can be quantified by proxy from archaeological evidence, providing measures of the rates of change during domestication. Among domestication traits, nonshattering cereal ears evolved more quickly in general than seed size. Nevertheless, most domestication traits show similarly slow rates of phenotypic change over several centuries to millennia, and these rates were similar across different regions of origin. Crops reproduced vegetatively, including tubers and many fruit trees, are less easily documented in terms of morphological domestication, but multiple lines of evidence outline some patterns in the development of vegecultural systems across the New World and Old World tropics. Pathways to plant domestication can also be compared in terms of the cultural and economic factors occurring at the start of the process. Whereas agricultural societies have tended to converge on higher population densities and sedentism, in some instances cultivation began among sedentary hunter–gatherers whereas more often it was initiated by mobile societies of hunter–gatherers or herder–gatherers."
The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas
2012
The Origins of Agriculture: New Data, New Ideas resulted from a Wenner-Gren-sponsored symposium held at the Hacienda Temozon, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico, March 6–13, 2009 (fig. 1). The symposium was organized by T. Douglas Price (Uni- versity of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Aber- deen) and Ofer Bar-Yosef (Harvard University). The major aim of the symposium was to better understand the origins of agriculture in light of new fieldwork, new sites, new analytical techniques, and more radiocarbon dates. The global nature of agricultural origins was a key theme, and a major focus of the discussions was on East Asia as well as lesser-known regions such as Papua New Guinea, Africa, and eastern North America, alongside more traditional areas such as the Near East and Mesoamerica. The papers presented in this supplementary issue are designed to provide the latest information on the antiquity of agriculture covering at least 10 different centers of domestication.S p o n s o r e d b y t h e W e n n e r-G r e n F o u n d a t i o n f o r A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l R e s e a r c h
New Ideas about the Origin of Agriculture Based on 50 Years of Museum-Curated Plant Remains
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1981
COMMITMENT to the perpetual storage and curation of archae-A ological plant remains was not commonplace in American museums of anthropology until quite recently. The historical bias against maintaining archaeological plant specimens undoubtedly derives from two sources.' First, museums have been accustomed to preserve obvious artifacts of human manufacture. These antiquities were regarded as cultural whereas animal bones and vegetable fragments and charcoal were considered environmental or subsistence evidence. Today, of course, these organic remains are recognized as products of human cultural behavior, because every culture classifies its biological world and selectively hunts or gathers from a range of possibilities. Thus these biological discards are evidence of past cultural principles guiding human extraction from nature. Furthermore, some of these remains are actually artifacts; that is, they represent plants and animals whose genetic composition or natural distribution was so altered by human selection and behavior that they could not survive in place or would not exist at all if it were not for human maintenance. Second, these plant remains are so fragile and heterogeneous in composition that many museums were, and continue to be, ill-prepared for their permanent curation. In both cases, theoretical predilection and benign neglect have led to incalculable loss of irreplaceable research data. Archaeological plant remains are indispensible to many problems of anthropological significance. They are evidence of past natural en
Plants 12(12):2310, 2023
De novo domestication is a novel trend in plant genetics, where traits of wild or semi-wild species are changed by the use of modern precision breeding techniques so that they conform to modern cultivation. Out of more than 300,000 wild plant species, only a few were fully domesticated by humans in prehistory. Moreover, out of these few domesticated species, less than 10 species dominate world agricultural production by more than 80% today. Much of this limited diversity of crop exploitation by modern humans was defined early in prehistory at the emergence of sedentary agro-pastoral cultures that limited the number of crops evolving a favorable domestication syndrome. However, modern plant genetics have revealed the roadmaps of genetic changes that led to these domestication traits. Based on such observations, plant scientists are now taking steps towards using modern breeding technologies to explore the potential of de novo domestication of plant species that were neglected in the past. We suggest here that in this process of de novo domestication, the study of Late Paleolithic/Late Archaic and Early Neolithic/Early Formative exploration of wild plants and identification of neglected species can help identify the barriers towards domestication. Modern breeding technologies may then assist us to break these barriers in order to perform de novo domestication to increase the crop species diversity of modern agriculture.