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News From the Field

Crop domestication is a balancing act


September 2, 2016

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The ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama revealed that living relatives of the earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.Full Story

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Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

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