A Reanalysis of Domestication Bottlenecks: Some Evidence from Maize and Why We Should Care

Most crop species underwent one or more demographic bottlenecks associated with domestication. Estimation of domestication bottlenecks has usually assumed simple neutral demographic models, and has predominantly utilized information from genic regions of the genome.  Here I present some preliminary data from maize pointing to problems with this approach as well as arguments for why we should care about the specifics of past demographic events.