Abstract Animal domestication is a profound change for human societies, economies, and worldviews. The shifting definitions of animal reflect its varying process-like nature. Reindeer one the species whose not easily pinned down using standard research methodologies domestication. In recent years, advances in archaeological methodology conceptual understanding have opened new avenues on this to...

Crop domestication frequently began with the selection of plants that did not naturally shed ripe fruits or seeds. The reduction in grain shattering that led to cereal domestication involved genetic loci of large effect. The molecular basis of this key domestication transition, however, remains unknown. Here we show that human selection of an amino acid substitution in the predicted DNA binding...

Selection and domestication of plants with genes that prevent grains from shattering in cereals was essential for human civilization's transition to agriculture-based societies. In this issue, Pourkheirandish et al. show that domestication of barley required evolution of a molecular system distinct from other grains, such as rice and maize, and reveal that present-day cultivars derive from two ...

Domestication has induced major genetic changes in crop plants to satisfy human needs and as a consequence of adaptation to agroecosystems. This adaptation might have affected root exudate composition, which can influence the interactions in the rhizosphere. Here, using two different soil types (sand, soil), we provide an original example of the impact of domestication and crop evolution on roo...

Amazonia offers some striking contrasts to better-known regions of the world, notably the Middle East, in which plants were domesticated. These contrasts are pertinent to attempts to formulate general principles of evolution under domestication, particularly now that some of these are being critically reexamined. Topics covered in this paper include a generally applicable definition of plant do...

The domestication scenario that led to Asian rice (Oryza sativa) is a contentious topic. Here, we have reanalyzed a previously published large-scale wild and domesticated rice data set, which was also analyzed by two studies but resulted in two contrasting domestication models. We suggest that the analysis of false-positive selective sweep regions and phylogenetic analysis of concatenated genom...

Here, we aim to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the most significant outcomes in the literature regarding the origin of Phaseolus genus, the geographical distribution of the wild species, the domestication process, and the wide spread out of the centers of origin. Phaseolus can be considered as a unique model for the study of crop evolution, and in particular, for an understa...

The emergence of farming during the Neolithic transition, including the domestication of livestock, was a critical point in the evolution of human kind. The goat (Capra hircus) was one of the first domesticated ungulates. In this study, we compared the genetic diversity of domestic goats to that of the modern representatives of their wild ancestor, the bezoar, by analyzing 473 samples collected...

Wild emmer wheat, Triticum dicoccoides, is the progenitor of modern tetraploid and hexaploid cultivated wheats. Our objective was to map domestication-related quantitative trait loci (QTL) in T. dicoccoides. The studied traits include brittle rachis, heading date, plant height, grain size, yield, and yield components. Our mapping population was derived from a cross between T. dicoccoides and Tr...