ArticleFrontiers in plant science2021
Exaptation Traits for Megafaunal Mutualisms as a Factor in Plant Domestication.
Article in Frontiers in plant science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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5 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- 9,000-year-old barley consumption in the foothills of central Asia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Early evidence of avocado domestication from El Gigante Rockshelter, Honduras.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Trans-Holocene Bayesian chronology for tree and field crop use from El Gigante rockshelter, Honduras.PloS one · 2023Article
- Pathways to de novo domestication of crop wild relatives.Plant physiology · 2022Article
- Viruses Infecting Trees and Herbs That Produce Edible Fleshy Fruits with a Prominent Value in the Global Market: An Evolutionary Perspective.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
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7 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
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Abstract
Megafaunal extinctions are recurring events that cause evolutionary ripples, as cascades of secondary extinctions and shifting selective pressures reshape ecosystems. Megafaunal browsers and grazers are major ecosystem engineers, they: keep woody vegetation suppressed; are nitrogen cyclers; and serve as seed dispersers. Most angiosperms possess sets of physiological traits that allow for the fixation of mutualisms with megafauna; some of these traits appear to serve as exaptation (preadaptation) features for farming. As an easily recognized example, fleshy fruits are, an exaptation to agriculture, as they evolved to recruit a non-human disperser. We hypothesize that the traits of rapid annual growth, self-compatibility, heavy investment in reproduction, high plasticity (wide reaction norms), and rapid evolvability were part of an adaptive syndrome for megafaunal seed dispersal. We review the evolutionary importance that megafauna had for crop and weed progenitors and discuss possible ramifications of their extinction on: (1) seed dispersal; (2) population dynamics; and (3) habitat loss. Humans replaced some of the ecological services that had been lost as a result of late Quaternary extinctions and drove rapid evolutionary change resulting in domestication.
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