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# Mutations in rice and maize needed for domestication arose long before farming
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/drevnie-zemledeltsy-pri-odomashnivanii-rastenii-opiralis-na-izmenchivost-kotoraia-uzhe-sushchestvovala-v-dikikh-vidakh/
- Published: 2026-10-13T11:04:42.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-13T11:20:14.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Science, Nature

When ancient farmers domesticated plants, they relied on variation that already existed in wild species. Useful mutations were rare in the wild ancestors of cultivated plants, but people spent millennia selecting plants with the desired traits, and the frequency of those mutations rose.

The chief trait of domesticated rice is that the ripe grains do not shatter from the panicle and can be gathered. The mutation in the qSH3 gene, which is responsible for this trait, appears already to have been present in wild rice, and its frequency rose for more than 2000 years, beginning about 9000 years ago. In maize, the mutation in the tga1 gene, which freed the kernel from its hard casing, arose more than 40,000 years ago, although maize was domesticated only about 9000 years ago. Even the cold tolerance thanks to which rice spread into temperate climates about 4000 years ago rested on ancient variants of genes.

Scientists from New York University determined the age of the mutations from the genealogical trees of genome segments and checked the results against archaeological finds of grains in the Yangtze valley