A New Evolutionary Population Genetic Theory of Plant and Animal Domestication

Approximately 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, human populations in at least eight regions of the world began forging an ever closer relationship with numerous wild plant and animals. This entanglement between humans and the natural world resulted in the controlled reproduction of domestic plants and animals and led to significant alterations of the genetic, behavioral, and phenotypic characteristics of all the organisms involved. The study of domestication is useful not only as an evolutionary model (as Darwin recognized), but also because the agricultural economies that domestication made possible now underpin urban societies (and 7 million people) across the globe. Despite its importance and decades of academic investigation by archaeologists, anthropologists, and biologists, we are only now beginning to appreciate and unravel the complexity of domestication's origins and subsequent development.

This presentation begins with a discussion about the nature of origins and why definitions of domestication have often precluded our ability to grasp the processes involved. By using separate plant and animal case studies, I will illustrate the principles of an emerging perspective regarding the different routes along which animal domestication proceeded, and the evidence for continual admixture between domestics and wild populations even including different species. Lastly, I will discuss how this new population genetic theory of domestication informs our understanding of the origins of domestic animals, and our perspective regarding the genetic makeup of modern commercial populations.