Domestication and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers of Plant Domestication" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the past decade, a growing group of biologists, ecologists, and anthropologists have proposed a paradigm-shifting revision to the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory: the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). The EES seeks to foreground developmental plasticity, epigenomics, and niche construction as evolutionary drivers. The EES is helping domestication theorists stop "talking past each other in a crowded room," and has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the origins of agriculture by shifting our focus away from fixed traits and mechanical reactions and onto flexible responses – by both plants and people. The capacity of crop progenitors to immediately respond to cultivation may have been a key factor that determined which species were domesticated, and effected how that process unfolded. Culture, with its ability to encode complex bodies of ecological knowledge, can be fully integrated into evolutionary explanations of the origins of agriculture via the extended phenotype and ecological inheritance. Beyond anthropology, EES informed studies of domesticates and their progenitors are the best way to answer important unresolved questions in evolutionary biology about how and why genetic assimilation occurs. However, pursuing any of these lines of inquiry requires a revival and expansion of experimental and ethnoarchaeological approaches to domestication studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Frontiers of Plant Domestication   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23458