Maize Adaptation to Changing Environments

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

All organisms must contend with rapidly changing environments in the face of climate change in order to ensure the survival of the population (Hoffmann and Sgrò 2011). Domesticated plants, with a 10,000 year history of adapting to new environments, provide an excellent model for understanding genetic responses to changing climate as well as domestication genetics. Maize (Zea mays ssp. mays), a globally critical crop plant with extensive genomic resources, was domesticated from the tropical grass teosinte (Zea mays ssp. parviglumis). Although maize demographics during domestication and improvement were not straightforward (Beissinger et al. 2016; Hufford et al. 2013; Vallebueno-Estrada et al. 2016, 2022; Wang et al. 2017), populations fluctuated as people moved maize into increasingly novel environments, resulting in a wide variety of adaptations to different environments in a short period of time (Hufford et al. 2012b). Maize has a complex demographic history (Hufford et al., 2012a, 2013; Wang et al. 2017) and archaeological samples represent a unique opportunity to directly sample ancient diversity and to evaluate allelic combinations not present in extant samples in the context of changing environments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36192.0