Yet 3 species account for 60% of food energy intake by humans: rice, maize, wheat. Typically, few genotypes are grown or harvested. Despite this, abundant genetic variation exists in the wild ancestors of feed crops. Severe bottleneck: only a tiny subset of individuals of the wild population are chosen to be cultivated. Strong artificial selection: humans breed and retain the best performing crop plants. Selection on germination timing, seed size, nutrition. H: average frequency of the heterozygous individuals per gene locus. P: proportion of gene loci that are polymorphic. : average number of nucleotide differences per site, for any randomly sampled pair of nucleotides. On what traits did our ancestors select. Case study: domestication of maize from teosinte domestication 10,000 - 5000 ya application of artificial selection before discovery of genetics & natural selection domestication led to dramatic loss of variation. Can we distinguish which loci have lost variation . What do both bottlenecks and selection do.