The origin of agriculture radically changed the course of human history. In recent years, evidence from archaeology and molecular genetics has shed new light on this major evolutionary transition, and forced us to re-think fundamental questions about why and how agriculture originated. The answers to these questions are critical to understanding the co-dependence of modern humans and our crop species.This project is an inter-disciplinary collaboration, and has been tackling these questions using an experimental approach. Our focus has been primarily on the process of specialization on a limited range of food resources, which occurred during the transition from plant gathering to cultivation.
We have been particularly interested in the impacts of rising atmospheric CO2 immediately before the origin of agriculture, and the ecological traits of food plants that made them amenable (or not) to cultivation, and subsequently to domestication. This ecological selection process has been a hot topic ever since Darwin’s work on the subject.
We have a long-standing collaborations in this work with Glynis Jones and Mark Rees.
Selected recent publications in this area
Preece, C., Clamp, N., Warham, G., Charles, M., Rees, M., Jones, G., Osborne, C.P. (2017) Cereal progenitors differ in stand harvest characteristics from related wild grasses. Journal of Ecology, 10.1111/1365-2745.12905. link
Preece, C., Livarda, A., Wallace, M.P., Charles, M., Christin, P.-A., Jones, G., Rees, M., Osborne, C.P. (2015) Were Fertile Crescent crop progenitors higher yielding than other wild species that were never domesticated? New Phytologist, 207, 905-913. link
Simpson, K.J., Wade, R.N., Rees, M., Osborne, C.P., Hartley, S.E. (2017) Still armed after domestication? Impacts of domestication and agronomic selection on anti-herbivore defences in cereals. Functional Ecology, 31, 2108-2117. link
Kluyver, T.A., Jones, G., Pujol, B., Bennett, C., Mockford, E.J., Charles, M., Rees, M., Osborne, C.P. (2017) Unconscious selection drove seed enlargement in vegetable crops. Evolution Letters, 1, 64-72. link
Preece, C., Livarda, A., Christin, P.-A., Wallace, M., Martin, G., Charles, M., Jones, G., Rees, M., Osborne, C.P. (2017) How did the domestication of Fertile Crescent grain crops increase their yield? Functional Ecology, 31, 387-397. link
Cunniff, J., Jones, G., Charles, M., Osborne, C.P. (2017) Yield responses of wild C3 and C4 crop progenitors to sub-ambient CO2: a test for the role of CO2 limitation in the origin of agriculture. Global Change Biology, 23, 380-390. link
Cunniff, J., Charles, M., Jones, G., Osborne, C.P. (2016) Reduced plant water status under sub-ambient pCO2 limits plant productivity in the wild progenitors of C3 and C4 cereals. Annals of Botany, 118, 1163-1173. link
Milla, R., Osborne, C.P., Turcotte, M.M., Voille, C. (2015) Plant domestication through an ecological lens. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 30, 463-469. link