Has anyone tried dating the domestication of crops and animals by DNA analysis?

Question

The same way they do with human Mt DNA and population movements? It would probably be more accurate than looking for seeds in stone age houses as a way of dating when we started farming, as you could find ways to test the mutation rate of plants quite easily with mass propogations.

If anyone has any info on this, please give links!

Answer 1

Most of what I've been able to find on plant domestication indicates this may have come about ~12,000 yrs ago, not the 6 or 7,000 yrs ago commonly accepted.   Wheat appears to have been among the 1st plants domesticated. Chloroplast (cpDNA) is being used to do some back tracking on plant evolution & domestication.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/article...

http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ggs/...

I will continue to build on this & update it for you later as I pull up some old links.

http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/orig_a...

O.K.  I think you will find this useful:

http://anthropology.si.edu/archaeobio/Ze...

I've long suspected the so called "hunter gatherers" brought seed with them as they migrated to "greener pastures" while following game animals.  The thought that they suddenly decided to stay in one place to form long lasting villages simply does not ring true.  I suspect they planted food during warm months then, after the harvest, followed game animals or moved to areas with more productive soil.  Migrant workers that carried enough seed for a future crop with them.

Answer 2

The American National Academy of Sciences has a publication about the domestication of pigs in the neolithic based upon comparisons of mtDNA of ancient and modern Swine.  (See below #1).

Also, (See #2) some work was done with horse remains found in France.

Work on cattle (see #3) and a couple of general articles on old and new world livestock domestication based on genetic comparison (#4).

Here is some research done on a strain of wheat (See #5).

I've also seen stuff on domesticated cats and dogs recently, so I know it's out there.

Answer 3

No links to give....but they probably have dated them by DNA.

Used to be the age of the strata they were found in.....But, the problem with outright dating of thousands of years' old artifacts is...is the DNA still viable and intact enough to be dated.

I LOVE TDs....shows your research is outdated! This 'domestication' occurred thousands of years before what they're still reporting now...do the research!

Answer 4

DNA analysis have been done on dogs which determined that most modern dogs were descended from three separate domestication from wolves stock (source 1). Analysis on DNA puts the earliest domestication of dogs (wolves) at around 100,000 years ago which is much earlier than what fossil evidence shows(source 2).

According genetic studies domestication of pigs and sheep were determined to occur in two separate places at the almost the same time. (source 3).

As for domestication of plants, there is a paper by Heun et. al detailing the DNA analysis of the domestication of wheat in the near east. (source 4)

Answer 5

George Beadle famously tracked the origins and domestication of maize, probably from a plant called teocinte, in the New World in the 1930s. Subsequent genetic studies (since DNA was discovered) have bolstered support for his his work, and provided some alternate paths. Wikipedia actually covers that well enough, but there's plenty of info on the web about it.

Plants do not have MtDNA, as they have no mitochondria in their cells. The course, then, is to establish mutation rates on normal DNA, which isn't quite as much fun. Part of the problem on figuring the origins of agriculture in this manner is defining what constitutes domestication from this research direction. If we find evidence of deliberate cross-pollination, for instance, is that real domestication? The cut-off isn't exactly discrete. The thing about finding stored seeds in prehistoric houses is that the discovery leaves little doubt that these people were practicing agriculture at least at that point in time.

Not that it may never be done or anything, just that the ways to be adequately sure of the answer are currently fewer with DNA studies.