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      Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies

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          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          It is difficult to overstate the cultural and biological impacts that the domestication of plants and animals has had on our species. Fundamental questions regarding where, when, and how many times domestication took place have been of primary interest within a wide range of academic disciplines. Within the last two decades, the advent of new archaeological and genetic techniques has revolutionized our understanding of the pattern and process of domestication and agricultural origins that led to our modern way of life. In the spring of 2011, 25 scholars with a central interest in domestication representing the fields of genetics, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, and archaeology met at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center to discuss recent domestication research progress and identify challenges for the future. In this introduction to the resulting Special Feature, we present the state of the art in the field by discussing what is known about the spatial and temporal patterns of domestication, and controversies surrounding the speed, intentionality, and evolutionary aspects of the domestication process. We then highlight three key challenges for future research. We conclude by arguing that although recent progress has been impressive, the next decade will yield even more substantial insights not only into how domestication took place, but also when and where it did, and where and why it did not.

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          Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behavior.

          The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.
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            Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia.

            In 1967 the Kibish Formation in southern Ethiopia yielded hominid cranial remains identified as early anatomically modern humans, assigned to Homo sapiens. However, the provenance and age of the fossils have been much debated. Here we confirm that the Omo I and Omo II hominid fossils are from similar stratigraphic levels in Member I of the Kibish Formation, despite the view that Omo I is more modern in appearance than Omo II. 40Ar/39Ar ages on feldspar crystals from pumice clasts within a tuff in Member I below the hominid levels place an older limit of 198 +/- 14 kyr (weighted mean age 196 +/- 2 kyr) on the hominids. A younger age limit of 104 +/- 7 kyr is provided by feldspars from pumice clasts in a Member III tuff. Geological evidence indicates rapid deposition of each member of the Kibish Formation. Isotopic ages on the Kibish Formation correspond to ages of Mediterranean sapropels, which reflect increased flow of the Nile River, and necessarily increased flow of the Omo River. Thus the 40Ar/39Ar age measurements, together with the sapropel correlations, indicate that the hominid fossils have an age close to the older limit. Our preferred estimate of the age of the Kibish hominids is 195 +/- 5 kyr, making them the earliest well-dated anatomically modern humans yet described.
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              Developmental Plasticity and Evolution

              The first comprehensive synthesis on development and evolution: it applies to all aspects of development, at all levels of organization and in all organisms, taking advantage of modern findings on behavior, genetics, endocrinology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory and phylogenetics to show the connections between developmental mechanisms and evolutionary change. This book solves key problems that have impeded a definitive synthesis in the past. It uses new concepts and specific examples to show how to relate environmentally sensitive development to the genetic theory of adaptive evolution and to explain major patterns of change. In this book development includes not only embryology and the ontogeny of morphology, sometimes portrayed inadequately as governed by "regulatory genes," but also behavioral development and physiological adaptation, where plasticity is mediated by genetically complex mechanisms like hormones and learning. The book shows how the universal qualities of phenotypes--modular organization and plasticity--facilitate both integration and change. Here you will learn why it is wrong to describe organisms as genetically programmed; why environmental induction is likely to be more important in evolution than random mutation; and why it is crucial to consider both selection and developmental mechanism in explanations of adaptive evolution. This book satisfies the need for a truly general book on development, plasticity and evolution that applies to living organisms in all of their life stages and environments. Using an immense compendium of examples on many kinds of organisms, from viruses and bacteria to higher plants and animals, it shows how the phenotype is reorganized during evolution to produce novelties, and how alternative phenotypes occupy a pivotal role as a phase of evolution that fosters diversification and speeds change. The arguments of this book call for a new view of the major themes of evolutionary biology, as shown in chapters on gradualism, homology, environmental induction, speciation, radiation, macroevolution, punctuation, and the maintenance of sex. No other treatment of development and evolution since Darwin's offers such a comprehensive and critical discussion of the relevant issues. Developmental Plasticity and Evolution is designed for biologists interested in the development and evolution of behavior, life-history patterns, ecology, physiology, morphology and speciation. It will also appeal to evolutionary paleontologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and teachers of general biology.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                April 29 2014
                April 22 2014
                April 29 2014
                : 111
                : 17
                : 6139-6146
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Durham Evolution and Ancient DNA, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom;
                [2 ]Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC 20560;
                [3 ]Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Republic of Panama;
                [4 ]School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom;
                [5 ]Department of Biology, New York University, New York, NY 10003-6688;
                [6 ]Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University, SE-75123 Uppsala, Sweden;
                [7 ]Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SE-75007 Uppsala, Sweden;
                [8 ]Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY, United Kingdom;
                [9 ]Department of Anthropology, Center for Comparative Archaeology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260;
                [10 ]Department of Biology and
                [11 ]School of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia;
                [12 ]Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UF, Scotland;
                [13 ]Botany Department, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078;
                [14 ]Department of Plant Sciences/MS1, Section of Crop and Ecosystem Sciences, and
                [15 ]Centre for GeoGenetics and Section for Evolutionary Genomics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, 1350 Copenhagen, Denmark;
                [16 ]Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210;
                [17 ]Department of Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada N1G 2W1;
                [18 ]Anthropology Department, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130;
                [19 ]Division of Biological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211;
                [20 ]Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, CA 95616;
                [21 ]Departamento de Ecología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Granada, E-18071 Granada, Spain; and
                [22 ]Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
                Article
                10.1073/pnas.1323964111
                24757054
                4368501b-bf54-4a80-8df4-580f44c24326
                © 2014
                History
                Product
                Self URI (article page): https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1323964111

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