The earliest maize from San Marcos Tehuacán is a partial domesticate with genomic evidence of inbreeding

Abstract

Pioneering archaeological expeditions lead by Richard MacNeish in the 1960s identified the valley of Tehuacán as an important center of early Mesoamerican agriculture, providing by far the widest collection of ancient crop remains, including maize. In 2012, a new exploration of San Marcos cave (Tehuacán, Mexico) yielded nonmanipulated maize specimens dating at a similar age of 5,300–4,970 calibrated y B.P. On the basis of shotgun sequencing and genomic comparisons to Balsas teosinte and modern maize, we show herein that the earliest maize from San Marcos cave was a partial domesticate diverging from the landraces and containing ancestral allelic variants that are absent from extant maize populations. Whereas some domestication loci, such as teosinte branched1 (tb1) and brittle endosperm2 (bt2), had already lost most of the nucleotide variability present in Balsas teosinte, others, such as teosinte glume architecture1 (tga1) and sugary1 (su1), conserved partial levels of nucleotide variability that are absent from extant maize. Genetic comparisons among three temporally convergent samples revealed that they were homozygous and identical by descent across their genome. Our results indicate that the earliest maize from San Marcos was already inbred, opening the possibility for Tehuacán maize cultivation evolving from reduced founder populations of isolated and perhaps self-pollinated individuals.