14,000-year-old seeds indicate the Levantine origin of the lost progenitor of faba bean.

Abstract

The understanding of crop domestication is dependent on tracking the original geographical distribution of wild relatives. The faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is economically important in many countries around the world; nevertheless, its origin has been debated because its ancestor could not be securely identified. Recent investigations in the site of el-Wad (Mount Carmel, Israel), provide the first and, so far, only remains of the lost ancestor of faba bean. X-ray CT scan analysis of the faba beans provides the first set of measurements of the biometry of this species before its domestication. The presence of wild specimens in Mount Carmel, 14,000 years ago, supports that the wild variety grew nearby in the Lower Galilee where the first domestication was documented for Neolithic farmers 10,200 years ago.

Plant phenotyping relevance

X線CTを用いて古代ソラマメ種子の生体計測を抽出する手法を適用し、種子形態という植物形質を測定している。方法開発ではないが、CTによる表現型取得が研究結果の中心的根拠となっている。

Code and data availability

The paper's phenotyping inputs (micro-CT scans of three archaeological faba bean seeds) and morphometric/PCA results are only available as supplementary files (srep37399-s1.doc and three videos) hosted on the publisher/PMC, with no authors' public repository URL among the allowed URLs and no explicit public deposit or,

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.