Vavilov's Centers of Crop Origins vs. Centers of Diversity: Why Does That Distinction Matter?

Building on deCandolle and even Darwin, Nikolai Vavilov developed the first testable theories regarding bio-geographic discernment of areas of crop origins. His maps have then been used as the basis for discussing the biogeography of centers of crop land race diversity and diversity of wild crop relatives, if not mega enters of wild biodiversity in general. Jack Harlan cautioned against confusing and conflating these different geographies, but his center vs. non- centers counter proposal was less than satisfactory. New advances in genetics, historic linguistics, archaeology and paleoclimatic habitat suitability modeling have now been used by an interdisciplinary team of us to advance a new integrative method for determining the geographic origins of particular crops, but it can also help determine whether several crop domestications were culturally or ecologically related in space and time. However, the issues of determining land rice diversity hotspots, wild crop relative hotspots, and overall biodiversity hotspots are only marginally useful in determining crop origins. What's more, current hotspots for wild and cultivated plant diversity may be artifacts of prehistoric and historic land use changes associated with periods of colonization, conflict and landscape degradation that confound our sense of where diversity was situated at Thor immediately after the re of domestication. Examples from chile peppers, beans and what will bring these points home.