A recent paper prompts the question:
Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process
The evidence from ancient crops over the past decade challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the process of domestication. The emergence of crops has been viewed as a technologically progressive process in which single or multiple localized populations adapt to human environments in response to cultivation. By contrast, new genetic and archaeological evidence reveals a slow process that involved large populations over wide areas with unexpectedly sustained cultural connections in deep time. We review evidence that calls for a new landscape framework of crop origins. Evolutionary processes operate across vast distances of landscape and time, and the origins of domesticates are complex. The domestication bottleneck is a redundant concept and the progressive nature of domestication is in doubt. Robin G. Allaby, Chris J. Stevens, Logan Kistler, Dorian Q.Fuller Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Month 2021, Vol. xx, No. xx https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.11.002
The paper is open access.
Aren’t domestic plants better cared for than weeds? How do we know it was all on our side? We assume that – but then, we would, right? No, not crazy here. Just wondering if it’s as simple as we thought.