The study of an international team published Thursday March 3 in “Science” reveals two independent domestication households, 11,500 years ago, in the Caucasus and in the fertile crescent, thanks to the deciphering of the genome of hundreds of cultivated varieties and wild shapes.
by florence rosier
Where and when was the vine domestic? Although mythical, this event seemed to have dissolved in the dawn of time. Many clues, including textuals, pointed to the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan today) and around. According to the Bible, Noah would have, after the flood, planted her first vines on Mount Ararat, east of Anatolia. And in the epic of Gilgamesh, a narrative of four thousand years old, the king of Uruk would have met the “wine woman” (responsible for producing and selling the precious drink) in Dilmun, in the current Persian Gulf. As for the word “wine”, it would derive from vocables forged in Anatolia and in the Caucasus, which led to the Indo-European root *Wvn then in Greek terms οίνός and Latin Vinum.
Scientists, for their part, remained shared. For some, there would have been only one domestication event in the Caucasus. For the others, there would have been two, the second having occurred in the fertile crescent, the cradle of agriculture (a region of the Near East which goes from the Dead Sea to the Persian Gulf). As for the time of this domestication, it too remained misty. According to two studies published in 2017 and 2018, for example, it would date from around 8,000 years ago.
Once again, DNA spoke. and the history engraved on this long ribbon, As we tell it of researchers in the Revue Science on March 3, upsets these notions . An international team has deciphered the genome of some 1,600 cultivated varieties (grape varieties) and 840 wild (lambrusc) forms from 16 countries around the world. By the way, a curiosity: the genome of the vine, about 6 times shorter than the human genome, has more genes: around 30,000 for the vine, against 20,000 for our species.
“of the Never seen “
Thanks to this deciphering, the researchers retraced the adventure of the domestication of Vitis Vinifera. How ? By mapping the resemblances and differences of the genome of these domestic and wild varieties. “Nearly 1,000 varieties analyzed came from two French collections of INRAE [National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment], one in Bordeaux, the other in Montpellier, which houses the Collection of the Vassal estate, the richest in the world, “said Thierry Lacombe, professor at the Agro Montpellier Institute, co -author of the study. Other varieties analyzed, for example from old armenia vineyards, had never been clearly identified.
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