A morphometric approach to track opium poppy domestication.

ABSTRACT: Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L. subsp. somniferum) was likely domesticated in the Western Mediterranean, where its putative wild ancestor is indigenous, and then spread to central and northern Europe. While opium poppy seeds are regularly identified in archaeobotanical studies, the absence of morphological criteria to distinguish the seeds of wild and domestic forms prevents the documentation of their respective historical and geographical occurrences and of the process of opium domestication as a whole. To fill this gap and better understand the status of this crop in the Neolithic, we combined seed outline analyses, namely elliptic Fourier transforms, with other morphometric descriptors to describe and identify Papaver setigerum, Papaver somniferum and other Papaver taxa. The combinat

SUBMITTER: Jesus A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8105347 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature