If you are a domestication nut like I am, you must be sure to get your hands on a copy of the June 29, 2007 issue of Science magazine. The issue includes several articles on recent domestication studies, including:
A spike of wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides), the progenitor of the cultivated tetraploid and hexaploid wheats, relict discovered 101 years ago in northern Israel.
Photo Credit: Zvi Peleg
Wheat, a study from Jorge Dubcovsky and Jan Dvorak at UC Davis' Department of Plant Sciences, which describes the genetic propensity of wheat to dynamically react to bottlenecks by generating new variations;
Cats, an article from Carlos Driscoll and colleagues at Oxford that includes molecular data supporting the domestication for cats as having occurred more than 9,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, about the same time and place as wheat;
and a report from archaeologist Tom Dillehay on several sites in the Ñanchoc Valley in the Peruvian Andes where directly dated domesticated squash (9240-7600 years before the present [bp]), peanut (7840 bp), quinoa (8000-7500 bp), and cotton (5490 bp) have been recovered from sealed house floors (which are pretty close to perfect proveniences, by the way).
Linked below is some more data on the origins of wheat and the new cat information; I need to do some more work before I'm ready to report in detail on Ñanchoc though. Be sure to look to Michael Balter's excellent news focus article at Science for more information about the status of what we know about world wide crop domestications today.
A spike of wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides), the progenitor of the cultivated tetraploid and hexaploid wheats, relict discovered 101 years ago in northern Israel.
Photo Credit: Zvi Peleg
Cats, an article from Carlos Driscoll and colleagues at Oxford that includes molecular data supporting the domestication for cats as having occurred more than 9,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, about the same time and place as wheat;
and a report from archaeologist Tom Dillehay on several sites in the Ñanchoc Valley in the Peruvian Andes where directly dated domesticated squash (9240-7600 years before the present [bp]), peanut (7840 bp), quinoa (8000-7500 bp), and cotton (5490 bp) have been recovered from sealed house floors (which are pretty close to perfect proveniences, by the way).
Linked below is some more data on the origins of wheat and the new cat information; I need to do some more work before I'm ready to report in detail on Ñanchoc though. Be sure to look to Michael Balter's excellent news focus article at Science for more information about the status of what we know about world wide crop domestications today.
Source Articles
Several of these articles are currently available for free; don't know how long that will last.- Seeking Agriculture's Ancient Roots: Michael Balter in Science
- The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication, Driscoll et al. in Science Express
- Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru, Dillehay et al. in Science
- Genome Plasticity a Key Factor in the Success of Polyploid Wheat Under Domestication, Dubcovsky and Dvorak in Science
Comments