On the necessity of combining ethnobotany and genetics to assess agrobiodiversity and its evolution in crops: A case study on date palms ( L.) in Siwa Oasis, Egypt.

Crop diversity is shaped by biological and social processes interacting at different spatiotemporal scales. Here, we combined population genetics and ethnobotany to investigate date palm ( L.) diversity in Siwa Oasis, Egypt.

The Discovery of Wild Date Palms in Oman Reveals a Complex Domestication History Involving Centers in the Middle East and Africa.

For many crops, wild relatives constitute an extraordinary resource for cultivar improvement [1, 2] and also help to better understand the history of their domestication [3]. However, the wild ancestor species of several perennial crops have not yet been identified. Perennial crops generally present a weak domestication syndrome allowing cultivated individuals to establish feral populations difficult to distinguish from truly wild populations, and there is frequently ongoing gene flow between wild relatives and the crop that might erode most genetic differences [4].