S. jamseii flowers
Credit: Tim Lee/NHMU
Anthropologists at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah have traced the anthropogenic spread and cultivation of a relative of the potato, Solanum jamesii (the Four Corners potato). Their findings are published in PLOS ONE. This plant has been a culinary, medicinally and culturally important food crop across the Colorado Plateau for millennia.
Until now, despite its long history, the extent to which indigenous people domesticated S. jamesii has been unknown. Genetic evidence has shown that it had been transported and cultivated far from its natural range and had acquired frost resistance, longer dormancy and sprouting resilience, all of which made it more suitable for cultivation in its anthropogenic range. The Utah team have now shown how it arrived on the Colorado Plateau from its origins in the south-west USA, probably through a trading network.
A problem which I have found impossible to get a creationist to address without them running for the bolt-hole of ‘mysterious ways’ is the fact that, with only a very few exceptions, every domesticated animal and cultivated plant has been considerably improved on the wild stock and is always the result of a human-mediated evolutionary process. The result is often almost unrecognisable as the same species as their wild ancestor.
Yet according to the Bible, all animals and plants were created for the sole benefit of humankind by a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god. Had that been so, we could expect them to have been created fit for purpose and perfectly suited to the uses to which we put them. The fact that we have had to adapt them and change them so drastically to make them fit for purpose gives the lie to claims of intelligent design by an omniscient designer.
This relative of the potato therefore serves as an illustration of how humans, unwittingly or otherwise, have modified and changed the distribution of cultivated plants by inadvertently mimicking the process of evolution — mutation → selection → reproduction. S. jamesii is native to the Mogollon Rim, a region spanning south-central Arizona and into the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. The researchers were able to build a picture of how this plant was transported from there to the Four Corners region of southern Utah, south-west Colorado and north-west New Mexico by extracting the characteristic starch granules embedded in the stone tools used to process the tubers, recovered from 14 archaeological sites within and beyond the tuber’s natural range.
This research adds to the growing body of evidence that indigenous people in the south-western USA actively cultivated crops of their own and did not just acquire them from other peoples. It had previously been believed that they relied primarily on crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, such as maize, beans or squash. It also adds another species to the long list of plants and animals that have had to be modified from their wild type, and for which creationists are at a loss to explain why their supposed omniscient designer god did not do a very good job of it to begin with.
Artificial Selection vs “Intelligent Design”. One of the most awkward facts for creationism is that, with only a handful of exceptions, every domesticated animal and cultivated plant differs markedly from its wild ancestor. Wheat, maize, bananas, cattle, dogs, sheep and potatoes are not “as created” forms — they are the products of cumulative, human-guided evolutionary change.Details of the research are explained in a University of Utah news item by Lisa Potter.
This process is known as artificial selection, and it operates by exactly the same mechanism as natural selection:
Mutation → Selection → Reproduction
Random genetic variation arises in a population. Humans then preferentially propagate individuals with traits they find useful — larger fruits, reduced bitterness, docile behaviour, frost resistance, longer dormancy, higher yields or easier storage. Over many generations, those traits accumulate, producing organisms that are often barely recognisable as the same species as their wild progenitors.
In the case of Solanum jamesii, researchers have identified precisely these kinds of domestication traits:
- Frost resistance — improved survival in colder, higher-altitude environments
- Extended dormancy — better storage and delayed sprouting
- Sprouting resilience — improved regrowth after damage
- Geographical spread far beyond its natural range — clear evidence of human transport and cultivation
- Genetic divergence from wild populations — consistent with selective breeding
These changes did not appear fully formed. They accumulated gradually as indigenous farmers repeatedly favoured tubers that stored better, survived winter frosts and regrew reliably. In other words, S. jamesii is a textbook example of evolution in action.
This creates a fundamental problem for claims of “intelligent design”. According to the Bible, all plants and animals were created for the benefit of humankind by a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent designer. If that were true, we would expect food plants and domesticated animals to have been created fit for purpose from the outset.
Yet the reality is the exact opposite. Crops are often poorly suited to human needs until they are heavily modified. Wild potatoes are small, bitter and sometimes toxic. Wild cereals shatter their seeds. Wild cattle are aggressive. Wild bananas are full of hard seeds. Dogs descend from wolves that are manifestly unsuited to living as human companions.
Domestication traits are not refinements of a perfect design. They are workarounds imposed by humans on organisms that were never designed for agricultural use in the first place.
Even more tellingly, many domesticated traits reduce survival in the wild. Chickens bred for rapid growth suffer joint failure. Dairy cattle require constant human management. Modern crops often cannot compete with weeds without fertilisers and herbicides. These are not the hallmarks of organisms “designed” for human benefit.
Solanum jamesii adds yet another species to the long list of plants whose useful properties exist only because humans reshaped them through selective breeding. It is a quiet but devastating refutation of the claim that living things were intelligently designed for our use, and a clear, observable demonstration that complex, useful biological traits arise through incremental evolutionary change, not pre-packaged perfection.
This wild potato may change the agricultural story in the American Southwest
Academia has long dismissed the notion that Indigenous people of the American Southwest domesticated native plants.
Starchy residue preserved in ancient stone tools may rewrite the story of crop domestication in the American Southwest, according to new research led by the University of Utah.
The Four Corners potato (Solanum jamesii) has been an important cultural, nutritional and medicinal food staple across the Colorado Plateau for millennia. Despite its long history and contemporary use, the extent to which Indigenous people domesticated S. jamesii remains unknown. Previous genetic research has shown that the tubers were transported and intentionally cultivated far beyond its natural range—two crucial steps toward proving domestication.
In a new study, researchers analyzed hundreds of ground stone tools from dozens of archaeological sites located within and beyond the potato’s natural range. They were searching for microscopic starch granules from S. jamesii in the crevices of early food-processing tools—large slabs (metates) and handheld grinding stones (manos). S. jamesii granules were present on tools at nine of the archaeological sites, four of which showed consistent use of the tuber as early as 10,000 years ago.
These findings, combined with independent lines of evidence from nearly a decade of investigation, strongly support that the initial stages of S. jamesii domestication by Indigenous people occurred across the Four Corners region of the United States.
By adding new archaeological data and ethnographic interviews, we are building a case for domestication of S. jamesii in the American Southwest.
Lisbeth A. Louderback, senior author
Department of Anthropology
Natural History Museum of Utah
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
The study is the first to define the anthropogenic range of S. jamesii, a product of extensive trading networks across the Colorado Plateau. Indigenous people carried plants from their natural range to establish new populations along a narrow band in the Four Corners region, especially in present-day Escalante, Bears Ears and Mesa Verde.
Traits of S. jamesii from the anthropogenic range already show evidence of manipulation, including population-based variations in freezing tolerance, extended tuber dormancy, sprouting resilience, and we suspect there are others that can be identified in the genome. The next step in the project is to detect artificial selection—the ultimate evidence for full domestication.
Bruce M. Pavlik, co-author
Department of Anthropology
Natural History Museum of Utah
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
Images of S. jamesii starch granules found on stone tools near archaeological sites, with modern granules for reference.Credit: Louderback et. al. (2026) PLOS ONE.
These cultivated plants established a unique cultural element centered around the potato that continues to this day. Nearly all Diné (Navajo) elders interviewed for the study had special knowledge of the tuber, referring to it as “nímasii yázhí,” a term of personhood known as the tiny potato relative. Hopi elders used the term “tumna.” Remnant gardens with live plants are still found in those ancient gardens.
The mobility of Indigenous foodways was driven by kinship-based practices across the landscape. Indigenous knowledge holders, especially matrilineal women, held on to these seedlings and stories across generations to sustain ties to ancestral land and foodways.
Cynthia Wilson (Diné), co-author.
Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
University of California, Berkeley
California, USA.
Tubers, manos and metate
S. jamesii is a wild tuber native to the Mogollon Rim, a region spanning southcentral Arizona and into the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. Here, S. jamesii plants are common across the landscape. Outside of this natural range, populations tend to be small and usually occur near archaeological features.
Compared with red potatoes, Four Corners spuds have three times the protein, twice the calories and essential minerals and much more dietary fiber. The nutritious snacks were highly valued, easy to travel with and provided a consistent diet. In 2024, DNA analysis of the living plant populations revealed genetic corridors along which people transported and cultivated new populations.
Indigenous people prepared potatoes and other crops using manos and metates. The grinding process releases starch granules from plant tissues, which get lodged deep into crevices of the stone. Over the last decade, Louderback has advanced the method for extracting, isolating and identifying the starch granules.
Her team sampled 401 metates and manos from 14 archaeological sites within and beyond the tuber’s natural range. More than half of the tools came from the Natural History Museum of Utah’s archaeological collections, with the rest borrowed from various repositories across the country.
The tools with the highest proportion of S. jamesii starch granules came from the Four Corners region of southern Utah (North Creek Shelter), southwest Colorado (Long House, Mesa Verde) and northwest New Mexico (Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon). These sites also have populations of live plants growing nearby.
The starch granules corroborate our previous assertion that tubers were transported long distances, but it also suggests that the species was used persistently for thousands of years within the region we describe as the ‘anthropogenic range,’
Lisbeth A. Louderback.
Agricultural legacy on the Colorado Plateau
Academia has long dismissed the notion that Indigenous people of the American Southwest domesticated native plants, arguing instead that local agriculture relied primarily on crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, such as maize, beans or squash. Recent studies have challenged this paradigm by presenting evidence of people cultivating and influencing native plants, including agave, barley and amaranth. Yet these studies often fall short when compared to the robust documentation associated with plants from other regions of the world.
In the last decade, the study’s research team has pursued multiple, independent lines of evidence for S. jamesii domestication, including genetic, ecological, archaeological, biogeographical, ethnographic and linguistic data. Indigenous people routinely traded plants across the region, altering local landscapes and leaving ecological legacies that persist to this day. In 2021, the research group found dense concentrations of culturally significant plants surrounding archaeological sites, even when the species was absent from the wider environment. The Four Corners potato was one such species.
Indigenous potato-cultivation farmer harvest tubers from a Four Corners potato plant.Credit: Cynthia Wilson/
The study’s interviews revealed that Diné farmers and elders still know, grow and eat S. jamesii tubers, as well as use them for spiritual purposes, including in water offerings and seedling ceremonies. There was a striking difference in the way interviewees referred to the potato. Women used the present tense and knew how to process and eat the potato—all mentioned using glésh (special white clay) to reduce its bitterness. The men spoke about the potato in the past tense and had no specific understanding of its preparation. The interviewees talked in detail about how they use other wild plants and domesticated crops. All spoke of contemporary struggles, including access issues, that hinder their ability to continue traditional land-use practices and food systems.
Engaging the voices of Indigenous farmers and foragers on land-use practices is essential to preserve the Indigenous health of the land and the people by maintaining access to the tiny tubers from traditional, undisturbed populations.
Cynthia Wilson.
Other authors include Stefania Wilks, Kaley Joyce, and Sara Rickett of the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah; John Bamberg of the USDA/ARS, U.S. Potato Genebank; and Alfonso del Rio of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Some of the ground stone tools analyzed in this study originated from early archaeological expeditions to Chaco Canyon at the turn of the 20th century. Pueblo Bonito—the largest great house in Chaco Canyon— contains hundreds of rooms filled with an array of cultural materials, including vessels, jars, manos and metates, as well as rare and exotic items that reflect the region’s extensive trading networks. Room 28 (left, item #41181) held cylinder jars with preserved cacao residue, brightly colored Macaw feathers and pieces of turquoise, all of which had been imported from Mexico. In this same room, one of the metates contained starch residue from the Four Corners potato. Room 54 (right, item #411960) is another space in Pueblo Bonito that contained three metates with preserved S. jamesii starch residue. Altogether, 18 rooms within the great house held manos and/or metates bearing S. jamesii starch.
Credit: Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.
Publication:Louderback LA, Wilson C, Wilks SL, Joyce K, Rickett S, Bamberg J, et al. (2026)
Ancient use and long-distance transport of the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii) across the Colorado Plateau: Implications for early stages of domestication.
PLoS One 21(1): e0335671. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0335671
Once again, real-world evidence proves inconvenient for creationism. The authors of this study have no difficulty fitting their findings into a straightforward evolutionary framework, because that is exactly what the evidence demands. The genetic divergence of Solanum jamesii, the accumulation of domestication traits, and its anthropogenic spread across the Colorado Plateau are all precisely what we expect to see when variation is filtered through selection and reproduction over many generations.
There is nothing mysterious about this process, and there is certainly no need to invoke divine tinkering or “mysterious ways”. Indigenous farmers, by repeatedly favouring tubers that stored better, survived frosts and regrew reliably, unwittingly performed a long-term evolutionary experiment. The result is a plant that now bears the unmistakable genetic signature of human-guided selection — exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.
For creationists, however, this is yet another uncomfortable data point. Once again, the physical evidence points unambiguously to incremental evolutionary change, not to pre-packaged perfection by an omniscient designer. And once again, the only available escape route is to ignore the evidence, misrepresent it, or retreat into theology when the facts become too awkward.
The Four Corners potato therefore takes its place alongside wheat, maize, dogs, cattle and bananas as a living demonstration that useful biological traits arise through cumulative selection, not through intelligent design. As ever, evolution explains what we observe, while creationism explains nothing at all.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Obscene, threatening or obnoxious messages, preaching, abuse and spam will be removed, as will anything by known Internet trolls and stalkers, by known sock-puppet accounts and anything not connected with the post,
A claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Remember: your opinion is not an established fact unless corroborated.