**Olive Germplasm**

**Chapter 1** 

© 2012 Breton et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2012 Breton et al., licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**Origin and History of the Olive** 

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/51933

**1. Introduction** 

successively:

Catherine Marie Breton, Peter Warnock and André Jean Bervillé

1. The present distribution of the olive and its counterpart the wild olive,

methods, pollen databases, and chemical methods for oil traces;

publications that fill the gap here [1, 2, 3, 4].

between the oleaster and the olive in order to propose a wide scenario.

2. Archaeological records of wood charcoals and artifact remains, ethno-botanical

3. Molecular data obtained through 1995 to the present from *Olea europaea* and including relationships between varieties. We examined successively the evolution of methods to analyze data, the data sets examined through Bayesian methods, and the relationships

This article does not attempt to review all relevant literature on the history or background of the research, but rather focuses on the history of the olive tree and infers some shortcuts in the references of the work published. We apologize and readers can refer to recent general

To begin, the methodology followed to reconstruct the origin and history of the olive is presented. The genetic structure (density of alleles across the geographic distribution of individuals) based on allele frequencies of the present oleaster tree in the Mediterranean Basin computed with different methods of comparison with the genetic structure of cultivars grouped based on their geographic and genetic origins infers several possible scenarios for the transition from the oleaster to the olive. To screen among the scenarios requires solid dating in oleaster presence, diffusion and physical remains (from oleaster and cultivar trees) from different sites. Consequently, reconstructing the origin of the olive is based upon data from diverse disciplines and integrating them appears fruitful. Genetic data show that an event (such as bottleneck, migration, differentiation, adaptation) has occurred, but it cannot be dated. Thus it requires crossing genetic data with data gathered from different biological disciplines to make a strong case for this history. We examine
