Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies

Plant life defines the environments to which animals adapt and provides the basis of food webs. This was equally true for hunter-gatherer economies of ancestral humans, yet through the domestication of plants and the creation of agricultural ecologies based around them, human societies transformed vegetation and transported plant taxa into new geographical regions. These human–plant interactions ultimately co-evolved, increasing human population densities, technologies of farming, and the diversification of landraces and crop complexes. Research in archaeology on preserved plant remains (archaeobotany) and on the genomes of crops, including ancient genomes, has transformed our scientific understanding of the complex relationships between humans and plants that are entailed by domestication. Key realizations of recent research include the recognition that: the co-evolution of domesticates and cultures was protracted, the adaptations of plant populations were unintended results of human economies rather than intentional breeding, domestication took place in dozens of world regions involving different crops and cultures, and convergent evolution can be recognized among cropping types — such as among seed crops, tuber crops, and fruit trees. Seven general domestication pathways can be defined for plants. Lessons for the present-day include: the importance of diversity in the past; genetic diversity within species has the potential to erode over time, but also to be rescued through processes of integration; similarly, diversification within agricultural ecosystems has undergone processes of decline, including marginalised, lost and ‘forgotten’ crops, as well as processes of renewal resulting from trade and human mobility that brought varied crops and varieties together.