The Past (and Future?) of Our Crop Plants in Changing Global Environments

Summary

The development of agricultural societies, one of the most transformative events in human and ecological history, began independently in a number of world regions including the American tropics during a period of profound environmental change at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Plant domestication is at its core an evolutionary process involving both natural and human selection for traits favorable for harvesting and consumption. Scientists from a number of disciplines have long sought to understand the process of crop plant evolution, but still must rely on imperfect morphological and genetic data based on characteristics of living representatives of crops and wild progenitors in the modern climate, and limited archaeobotanical evidence. Experimental research on living crops and their wild ancestors together with recently developed molecular applications are providing new understandings of, and mechanisms for, domestication and early agriculture. They include phenotypic (developmental) plasticity, a subject of rising importance in evolutionary biology and an oft-neglected concept in domestication research. This talk will discuss multi-year investigations of phenotypic, productivity, and gene expression changes in teosinte and maize when grown under atmospheric CO2 and temperature conditions that characterized the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods, when teosinte was first collected, cultivated, and transformed into maize.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19937