This report seeks to extend and apply the conceptual framework about the domestication of information and communication technologies. The domestication framework understands the adoption of technologies as a feedback process that converts technology artifacts from cold, lifeless tools to comfortable and useful consumer goods. This framework has been successful in helping us understand the adopt...

The Near East Fertile Crescent is well recognized as a primary center of barley origin, diversity, and domestication. A large number of wild barleys have been collected from the Tibetan Plateau, which is characterized by an extreme environment. We used genome-wide diversity array technology markers to analyze the genotypic division between wild barley from the Near East and Tibet. Our results c...

Over the last 10,000 years, crop domestication has been the single most important human cultural development. Grasses are prominent among these crops, and provide the vast majority of the world’s food. Similar traits have been selected during the domestication and breeding of these critically important grasses, and since they share a similar complement of genes, the same set of genes may have b...

This paper is a response, both to Fuller et al.’s recent criticism of Chinese research on rice domestication, as lacking evidence, and to their argument for the beginning of rice domestication around 4000 BC in the lower Yangzi River. We first survey previous publications that discuss the process from wild rice collection to rice domestication in China, and then examine early rice remains from ...

Backyard gardens, dump heaps, and kitchen middens are thought to have provided important venues for early crop domestication via generation of hybrids between otherwise isolated plant species. However, this process has rarely been demonstrated empirically. For the majority of polyploid crops, it remains uncertain to what extent hybridization and polyploidization preceded domestication or were p...

Domestication of the donkey from the African wild ass transformed ancient transport systems in Africa and Asia and the organization of early cities and pastoral societies. Genetic research suggests an African origin for the donkey, but pinpointing the timing and location of domestication has been challenging because donkeys are uncommon in the archaeological record and markers for early phases ...

Domestication has been essential to the progress of human civilization, and the process itself has fascinated biologists for hundreds of years. Domestication has led to a series of remarkable changes in a variety of plants and animals, in what is termed the "domestication phenotype." In domesticated animals, this general phenotype typically consists of similar changes in tameness, behavior, siz...

Global food demand, climatic variability and reduced land availability are driving the need for domestication of new crop species. The accelerated domestication of a rice-like Australian dryland polyploid grass, Microlaena stipoides (Poaceae), was targeted using chemical mutagenesis in conjunction with high throughput sequencing of genes for key domestication traits. While M. stipoides has prev...

During the process of plant domestication, below-ground communities are rarely considered. Some studies have attempted to understand the changes in root symbionts owing to domestication, but little is known about how it influences mycorrhizal response in domesticated crops. We hypothesized that selection for above-ground traits may also result in decreased mycorrhizal abundance in roots. Breadf...

Despite the fundamental role of plant domestication in human history and the critical importance of a relatively small number of crop plants to modern societies, we still know little about adaptation under domestication. Here we focus on efforts to identify the genes responsible for adaptation to domestication. We start from a historical perspective, arguing that Darwin's conceptualization of d...