Yam genomics supports West Africa as a major cradle of crop domestication
Résumé
While there has been progress in our understanding of the origin and history of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, a unified perspective is still lacking on where and how major crops were domesticated in the region. Here, we investigated the domestication of African yam (Dioscorea rotundata), a key crop in early African agriculture. Using whole-genome resequencing and statistical models, we show that cultivated yam was domesticated from a forest species. We infer that the expansion of African yam agriculture started in the Niger River basin. This result, along-side with the origins of African rice and pearl millet, supports the hypothesis that the vicinity of the Niger River was a major cradle of African agriculture.
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Cite 10.5281/zenodo.2540773 Jeu de données Scarcelli, N., Cubry, P., Akakpo, R., Thuillet, A.-C., Obidiegwu, J., Baco, M. N., Otoo, E., Sonké, B., Dansi, A., Djedatin, G., Mariac, C., Couderc, M., Causse, S., Alix, K., Chaïr, H., François, O., & Vigouroux, Y. (2019). Yam genomics supports West Africa as a major cradle of crop domestication [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.2540773