Perspectives on New World Plant Domestication in the Ancient DNA Era by Logan Kistler, PhD, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

This meeting will be held at the Charles Sumner School, 17th & M Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C. Entrance located on 17th Street.

NOTE: Photo ID is required to enter the building.

The meeting will start with refreshments at 6:45 pm and the lecture will begin at 7:15 pm.

The domestication of plants is the most transformative process in human history, and a ubiquitous cross-cultural precursor to social and population shifts through time. The agricultural revolution facilitated by domestication underpins population growth and social reorganization, drives land use changes impacting the environment, leads to biodiversity shifts in the anthropogenic ecosystem, and irreversibly re-shapes basic human-environment interactions. The domestication process is the symbiotic adaptation of plants to the human environment, and ancient DNA can be used to study the process in real time through the archaeological record. In this talk, Dr. Kistler will use some examples from his own work to discuss how ancient DNA and genomics are allowing us to understand plant domestication in the Americas like never before.

Dr. Logan Kistler is an environmental archaeologist who uses ancient DNA and genomics to study the evolution of domestic plants and other human-environment interactions. He is curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in the Department of Anthropology. His current research focuses on combining traditional knowledge and molecular methods to unravel manioc domestication in the Amazon, the role of phenotypic plasticity in domestication histories of pre-colonial ‘lost crops’ in eastern North America, and the fundamental evolutionary genomic patterns of domestication.