Genetic study tackles mystery of slow plant domestications
Did
domesticating a plant typically take a few hundred or many thousands of years? Genetic studies often indicate that domestication traits have a
fairly simple genetic basis, which should facilitate their rapid
evolution under selection. On the other hand, recent archeological
studies of crop domestication have suggested a relatively slow spread
and fixation of domestication traits. An article in “The Modern View of Domestication,” a special issue of PNAS, tries to resolve the discrepancy.