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Taxonomy and the origin and evolution of cultivated plants in the New World

Abstract

Current taxonomic problems in cultivated plants include delimitation of species, whether speciation has occurred under domestication, and the role of weedy relatives in the evolution of domesticates. Many cultivated plants of the New World seem to have been domesticated not once but several times, and agriculture itself may well have originated independently in four different parts of the Americas.

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Pickersgill, B. Taxonomy and the origin and evolution of cultivated plants in the New World. Nature 268, 591–595 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1038/268591a0

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