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April 21, 2014
Washington University in St. Louis
New research on domestication raises more questions than it has
answered. Scientists have outlined some of the key questions that have
been raised about this pivotal event in human history.
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More questions than answers as mystery of domestication deepens
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Credit: Brian Hare/Duke University [Click to enlarge image]
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Perhaps the most famous experiment in domestication is a project in Russia that
turned silver morphs of the wild red fox into tamer and more dog-like silver foxes in
just 40 generations. But the silver foxes were kept in cages on a fox farm where
they were sheltered and fed and illicit liaisons with wild foxes were thwarted. How
representative was this experiment of prehistoric domestication events?
e all think we have a rough idea of what happened 12,000 years ago
when people at several different spots around the globe brought
plants under cultivation and domesticated animals for transport, food
or fiber. But how much do we really know?
Recent research suggests less than we think. For
example, why did people domesticate a mere dozen or
so of the roughly 200,000 species of wild flowering
plants? And why only about five of the 148 species of
large wild mammalian herbivores or omnivores? And
while we're at it, why haven't more species of either
plants or animals been domesticated in modern times?
If nothing else, the tiny percentages of domesticates
suggests there are limitations to human agency, and
that it almost certainly is not true that people can step
in and completely remodel through artificial selection
an organism shaped for millennia by natural selection.
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an organism shaped for millennia by natural selection.
The small number of domesticates is just one of many
questions raised in a special issue of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences published online
April 21.
The issue is the product of a 2011 meeting of scholars
with an interest in domestication at the National
Evolutionary Synthesis Center, a nonprofit science
center jointly operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and North Carolina State University.
Of the 25 scholars at the conference, two were from Washington University in St.
Louis: Arts & Sciences' Fiona Marshall, PhD, professor of archaeology, who studies
animal domestication, and Kenneth Olsen, PhD, associate professor of biology, who
studies plant domestication.
Both Marshall and Olsen are currently engaged in research on the crumbling margins
of domestication where questions about this evolutionary process loom the largest.
Marshall studies two species that are famously ambivalently domesticated: donkeys
and cats. Olsen studies rice and cassava and is currently interested in rice mimics,
weeds that look enough like rice that they fly under the radar even when rice fields are
handweeded.
Both Marshall and Olsen contributed articles to the special PNAS issue and helped
write the introductory essay that raises the big questions confronting the field.
"This workshop was especially fun," said Olsen, "because it brought together people
working on plants and animals and archeologists and geneticists. I hadn't really
thought much about animal domestication because I work primarily with plants, so it
was exciting to see the same problem from a very different perspective."
How much of it was our doing? Many of our ideas about domestication are derived from
modern experience with animal breeding. Anyone familiar with the huge variety of dog
breeds, all of which belong to the same subspecies of the gray wolf, has some
appreciation of the power of selective breeding to alter appearance and behavior.
But what about self-fertilizing or wind-pollinated plants, or for that matter, domesticated
animals accidentally or deliberately bred with wild relatives?
Recent evidence that cereal crops, such as wheat or barley, evolved domestication
traits much more slowly than had been thought has led to renewed interest in the idea
that selection during domestication may have been partly accidental.
Charles Darwin himself drew a distinction between conscious selection, in which
humans directly select for desirable traits, and unconscious selection, where traits
evolve as a byproduct of natural selection in crop fields or from selection on other
traits.
"The big focus right now is how much unintentional change people were causing
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environmentally that resulted in natural selection altering both plants and animals,"
said Marshall.
"We used to think cats and dogs were real outliers in the animal domestication
process because they were attracted to human settlements for food and in some
sense domesticated themselves. But new research is showing that other
domesticated animals may be more like cats and dogs than we thought.
"Once animals such as donkeys or cattle were caught," Marshall said, "the changes
humans sought to make were pretty minimal. Really it just came down to culling a few
of the males and breeding all of the females."
Even today, she points out, African pastoralists can afford to kill only four out of every
100 cows or they run the risk that drought and disease will wipe out the entire herd.
"So I think outside of industrialized societies or special situations, artificial selection
was very weak," she said.
"In the donkeys and other transport animals, it's not affiliative [tame] behavior the
herders want," Marshall said. "What they care about more than anything else is that
their animals stay alive."
So artificial selection is acting in the same direction as natural selection, or maybe
pushing even harder, because humans often place animals in harsher conditions than
natural ones.
"The comparable idea for plants," said Olsen, "is the dump heap hypothesis, originally
proposed by Edgar Anderson, a botany professor here at Washington University. The
idea is that when people threw out the refuse of plant foods, including seeds, some
grew and again set seed, and in this way people inadvertently selected species they
were eating that also did well in the disturbed and nutrient-rich environment of the
dump heap."
"Cultivation practices play a huge role in selection," said Olsen. "Traditionally in
Southeast Asia, many different varieties of rice were grown simultaneously in a given
field. It was a bet-hedging strategy," he said, "that ensured some plants would survive
and produce seed even in a bad season." So it wasn't people selecting the crop plants
directly so much as people changing the landscape in ways that altered the selection
pressure on plants.
How best to time travel Questions about the original domestication events are difficult
to answer because plants and animals were domesticated before humans invented
writing, and so figuring out what happened has been a matter of making do with the
limited evidence that has survived.
The problem is particularly difficult for animal domestication because what matters
most is animal behavior, which leaves few traces. In the past, scientists tried
measuring bones or examining teeth, looking for age or size differences or pathology
that might plausibly be related to animals living with people.
"Sometimes there aren't morphological shifts that are easy to find or they're too late to
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tell us anything," Marshall said. "We've gone away from morphological identifiers of
domestication, and we're going with behavior now, however we can get it. If we've got
concentrations of dung, that means animals were being corralled," she said.
Olsen, on the other hand, seeks to identify genes in modern crop species that are
associated with domestication traits in the plant, such as an erect rather than a
sprawling architecture. The techniques used to isolate these genes are difficult and
time consuming and may not always penetrate as deeply into the past as scientists
had once assumed because present-day plants are only a subset of the crop varieties
that may have once existed.
So both Marshall and Olsen are excited by recent successes in sequencing ancient
DNA. Ancient DNA, they say, will allow hypotheses about domestication to be tested
over the entire evolutionary time period of domestication.
Another only recently appreciated clue to plant domestication is the presence of
enriched soils, created through human activities. One example is the terra preta in the
Amazon basin, which bears silent witness to the presence of a pre-Columbian
agricultural society in what had been thought to be untouched forest.
By mapping distributions of enriched soils, scientists hope to better understand how
ancient people altered landscapes and the effects that had on plant communities.
"It is really clear," Marshall said, "that we need all the different approaches that we can
possibly get in order to triangulate back. We're using all kinds of ways, coarse-grained
and fine, long-term and short, because the practical implications for us are quite
great."
After all, the first domestications may have been triggered by climate change at the
end of the last ice age -- in combination with social issues.
As a result, people abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle they had successfully
followed for 95 percent of human history and turned instead to the new strategies of
farming and herding.
As we head into a new era of climate change, Marshall said it would be comforting to
know that we understood what happened then and why.
"The Modern View of Domestication," a special issue of PNAS edited by Greger
Larson and Dolores R. Piperno, resulted from a meeting titled "Domestication as an
Evolutionary Phenomenon: Expanding the Synthesis," held April 7-11, 2011, that was
funded and hosted by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Centre (National Science
Foundation EF-0905606) in 2011.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Washington University in St.
Louis. The original article was written by Diana Lutz. Note: Materials may be edited for
content and length.
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Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Featured Research
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Washington University in St. Louis. "More questions than answers as mystery of
domestication deepens." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 April 2014.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140421093738.htm>.
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Journal References:
1. Fiona B. Marshall, Keith Dobney, Tim Denham, and Jos M. Capriles. Evaluating
the roles of directed breeding and gene flow in animal domestication.
PNAS, April 21, 2014 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1312984110
2. Andrew N. Doust, Lewis Lukens, Kenneth M. Olsen, Margarita Mauro-Herrera, Ann
Meyer, and Kimberly Rogers. Beyond the single gene: How epistasis and
gene-by-environment effects influence crop domestication. PNAS, April 21,
2014 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308940110
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