DISES: Coevolutionary dynamics of humans and maize in the Americas

玉米起源于美洲，但现在是世界上产量最高的作物，用于食品，动物饲料，燃料和工业制造。与一些种植多种主食作物的文化不同，美洲的许多土著人民主要依赖玉米。美洲许多人口和经济的生存和增长与玉米作物的成功息息相关，许多土著起源的故事甚至否认人类实际上是由玉米创造的。反过来，玉米种群的增长和传播依赖于人类的种植，现代玉米的形式是数千年来人类对饮食，文化和经济需求的选择的结果。一个由遗传学家和考古学家组成的跨学科团队将综合美洲人类和玉米的公开数据，并开发和应用新的分析方法来了解他们的入侵历史。以前对人类与其驯化的植物和动物之间关系的研究在很大程度上是片面的，但本项目中开发的方法将为其他研究人员提供明确研究驱动此类系统的相互作用的工具。这些事件的发生将在不断变化的环境中加以研究。 研究人员将把这些跨学科的方法纳入K-12学生的教育视频游戏中，其中包括遗传学，考古学和植物学课程。该项目将把联合收割机现有的方法与新开发的方法结合起来，共同估计传播和人口变化，以建立共同进化模型，并测试关于人类和玉米进化的具体先验假设。 将人口遗传学与考古数据相结合，研究人员将重建混合物和人口规模变化的历史，以了解玉米如何使人类人口和文化发生变化，以及人类运动和经济交流如何影响玉米的传播。土著语言数据与玉米遗传数据的系统发育比较将进一步评估人类文化和经济对玉米多样性模式化的影响，研究人员将使用额外的遗传、考古、该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的知识产权的支持。优点和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Corn, or maize, originated in the Americas but is now the most productive crop in the world, used for food, animal feed, fuel, and industrial manufacturing. Unlike some cultures that cultivated a broad array of staple crops, many indigenous peoples in the Americas relied primarily on maize. The survival and growth of many human populations and economies in the Americas was tied to the success of their maize crop, and many indigenous origin stories even posit that humans were literally created from maize. In turn, maize population growth and dispersal were dependent on human cultivation, and the modern maize form is the result of thousands of years of human selection for dietary, cultural, and economic needs. An interdisciplinary team of geneticists and archaeologists will synthesize publicly available data on humans and maize in the Americas and develop and apply novel analytical approaches to understand their entwined history. Previous studies of the relationship between humans and their domesticated plants and animals have been largely one-sided, but the approaches developed in this project will provide other researchers the tools to explicitly study the interactions driving such systems. These events occur and will be studied in the context of changing environments. Researchers will incorporate these interdisciplinary approaches into an educational video game for K-12 students that includes lessons on genetics, archaeology, and botany. The project will combine existing approaches with newly developed methodologies for co-estimating dispersal and demographic shifts to build co-evolutionary models and test specific a priori hypotheses about the evolution of humans and maize. Combining population genetics with archaeological data, researchers will reconstruct histories of admixture and population size change to how maize enabled human population and cultural change and how human movement and economic exchange patterned the dispersal of maize. Phylogenetic comparison of indigenous linguistic data to maize genetic data will further evaluate the impact of human culture and economy in patterning maize diversity, and researchers will use additional genetic, archaeological, and morphological data to test hypotheses about reciprocal cultural and genetic changes in each species.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.