Contrasting Patterns in Crop Domestication and Domestication Rates: Recent Archaeobotanical Insights from the Old World

By D. Fuller. Annals of Botany, 2007

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Background Archaeobotany, the study of plant remains from sites of ancient human activity, provides data for studying the initial evolution of domesticated plants. An important background to this is defining the domestication syndrome, those traits by which domesticated plants differ from wild relatives. These traits include features that have been selected under the conditions of cultivation. From archaeological remains the easiest traits to study are seed size and in cereal crops the loss of natural seed dispersal. Scope The rate at which these features evolved and the ordering in which they evolved can now be documented for a few crops of Asia and Africa. This paper explores this in einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) from the Near East, rice (Oryza sativa) from China, mung (Vigna radiata) and urd (Vigna mungo) beans from India, and pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) from west Africa. Brief reference is made to similar data on lentils (Lens culinaris), peas (Pisum sativum), soybean (Glycine max) and adzuki bean (Vigna angularis). Available quantitative data from archaeological finds are compiled to explore changes with domestication. The disjunction in cereals between seed size increase and dispersal is explored, and rates at which these features evolved are estimated from archaeobotanical data. Contrasts between crops, especially between cereals and pulses, are examined. Conclusions These data suggest that in domesticated grasses, changes in grain size and shape evolved prior to non-shattering ears or panicles. Initial grain size increases may have evolved during the first centuries of cultivation, within perhaps 500–1000 years. Non-shattering infructescences were much slower, becoming fixed about 1000–2000 years later. This suggests a need to reconsider the role of sickle harvesting in domestication. Pulses, by contrast, do not show evidence for seed size increase in relation to the earliest cultivation, and seed size increase may be delayed by 2000–4000 years. This implies that conditions that were sufficient to select for larger seed size in Poaceae were not sufficient in Fabaceae. It is proposed that animal-drawn ploughs (or ards) provided the selection pressure for larger seeds in legumes. This implies different thresholds of selective pressure, for example in relation to differing seed ontogenetics and underlying genetic architecture in these families. Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) may show some similarities to the pulses in terms of a lag-time before truly larger-grained forms evolved.

Subfields: Bioengineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electrochemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0c47d807fcbdb46b43218a55a27db49ec18c91c

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Citations in the corpus

Geographic distribution and domestication of wild emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccoides) (2010, background): “A recent reexamination of wheat spikelets bases (Tanno and Willcox 2006a) and a reappraisal (Fuller 2007) of the data, indicate that wild and domestic forms co-existed at sites for millennia.”
The Neolithic Southwest Asian Founder Crops (2011, background): “As Feldman and Kislev (2007) pointed out recently, the data of Mori et al. (2003), Özkan et al. (2002, 2005), and Luo et al. (2007) may indicate a diphyletic or polyphyletic origin of domesticated emmer, possibly in the Karacadağ area, as well as in the southern Levant.”
Plant Domestication and Crop Evolution in the Near East: On Events and Processes (2012, methodology): “1.1, p. 17; 2007) does not change the gradient of human energy input, it does render the assumption regarding the necessity of pre-domestication cultivation (Fuller, 2007, p. 904) redundant.”
Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East (2011, background): “Nevertheless, there has been a growing body of studies that do not fit with any one core area, but suggest a dispersed group of parallel processes (Allaby et al. 2010; Asouti 2010; Belfer-Cohen and Goring Morris 2010; Brown et al. 2009; Fuller 2007, 2008; Nesbitt 2004; Willcox 2005; Zeder 2009).”
Finding Plant Domestication in the Indian Subcontinent (2011, background): “Grain size and shape evolution in Indian rice does not appear to be early or precede full domestication as postulated for Chinese rice (Fuller 2007a).”
Domestication evolution, genetics and genomics in wheat (2011, background): “Initial grain size increases may have evolved during the first centuries of cultivation, within perhaps 500–1,000 years (Fuller 2007).”
Wild emmer wheat, 'Triticum dicoccoides', occupies a pivotal position in wheat domestication process (2011, background): “Initial grain size increases may have evolved during the first centuries of cultivation, within perhaps 500–1,000 years (Fuller, 2007).”
The evolving story of rice evolution (2008, background): “This mid-Holocene climate change in China would have had an impact on wild rice populations that likely declined and becoming locally extinct and it has been suggested that this may have promoted a faster rate of domestication [90] as other food sources such as nuts were also in decline (Fig.”
Comprehending crystalline β-carotene accumulation by comparing engineered cell models and the natural carotenoid-rich system of citrus (2011, neutral): “It should be noted here that Purugganan and Fuller (2011) were republished as an ‘original article’ by Fuller et al. (2012b) in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany with an almost identical data set, but the latter was converted into a ‘discussion’ (Fuller et al.”
Bacterial Associations with Legumes (2015, background): “In Africa, cereals were the basic food since ancient times together with legumes such as lentils and cowpea (Fuller, 2007).”
Distinguishing wild and domestic wheat and barley spikelets from early Holocene sites in the Near East (2012, background): “Data from grain measurements indicates that an increase in size started before the appearance of a change in the dispersal mechanism during the PPNA (Fuller 2007; Willcox 2004).”
Patterns and processes in crop domestication: an historical review and quantitative analysis of 203 global food crops. (2012, background): “In recent years, scientists have used molecular techniques to test and apply theories of crop origins put forward 150 yr ago by Darwin (1868) and De Candolle (1884) (Doebley et al., 1995; Gepts, 2004; Zohary, 2004; Fuller, 2007; Gregory, 2009; Brown, 2010).”