Domestic apples originated in central Asia.
We have native wild apple trees in Southeastern Kentucky but this species only grows up to crab size. I haven’t seen a lot of wild apple trees but I haven’t seen any that seemed truly wild with fruit bigger than 1 inch in diameter.
I’m interested in cider production so crab size is not necessarily a dealbreaker. I imagine an apple landrace that wanted to incorporate native apples might still hybridize with other species (which I read is not hard to do). Here I am very passively working with native pollen, some June Apple/Antonovka types, and a handful of other commercial varieties already in the space. To this I’ve been adding Malus sylvestris (European crabapple) but I haven’t done any intentional crosses. My new trees grown from seed are only two years old.
Maybe next time this topic comes to mind I will start a thread for landrace apple projects, I know this isn’t the place.
http://www.actforlibraries.org/crab-apple-trees-native-to-north-america/
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I would argue that oaks can be landraced – anything can be landraced! It just takes longer with perennials. 
I’m certain there are some oak trees with better tasting acorns (fewer tannins to leach out) than others, and I’m sure a person who was determined to landrace them could gather acorns from their favorite trees in a local wild forest and plant a brand new forest with those. Maybe somewhere that used to be a forest which was cut down a century ago to turn into a monoculture grain field, so it would be in a space that’s perfect for a forest without any other help. It may take a few generations of humans to turn it into a real, deliberate landrace, but it could totally be done. 
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My family works on a walnut breeding project which started about the time I came into the world. I currently plant 4th generation seeds. During that time, we moved the population 1 USDA zone colder, and 600 feet higher in elevation. Currently working on the next 600 feet rise in elevation.
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In Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, the book from which I first heard about landrace gardening, he devotes a section of the book to a discussion of jamon iberico. Pigs raised for this purpose eat acorns from the natural dehesa as a major food source. I seem to remember an observation or conjecture that these might be low tannin varieties?
Either way, seems you could breed it that way - - as you say likely over the course of multiple human generations. I believe at least one first nations method of processing acorns for eating has reached popular knowledge, so I’m incline to agree with the statement that there might be a tradeoff between convenience and storage life.
That’s really neat!
I’m particularly intrigued by how quickly you were able to move one USDA zone colder. I mean, four generations of trees is an entire human life, but that’s still very quick. If a tribe of indigenous people was migrating at approximately that rate, and they did the same thing your family has with walnut trees – and of course they would! – they could have taken almost any perennials they wanted to with them.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond claimed that it’s much harder to take crops to a different latitude (hence different temperatures) than longitude (often similar temperatures), and I’m sure he’s right. He said that means Eurasia had a huge advantage over the Americas in terms of agriculture.
But I’m starting to think that he vastly overestimated the difficulty, or vastly underestimated how quickly humans could overcome it with a little persistence.
I know acorns have long been (and still are!) a highly prized crop by a lot of indigenous people, and oaks grow all over North America, in many diverse climates. There are a whole lot of different oak species.
What if oaks are already highly landraced?
What if they’re everywhere because clever humans who prized them as food made sure to take them with them whenever they went?
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We are in relationship with so many creatures. How we treat them, the stories we tell about them, may do a great deal more to influence our entwined future than a couple dozen generations of breeding.
I think you’ll love this book, Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s a fantastic examination of humans’ relationship with plants and domestication, focused on Indigenous perspective.
I listen to parts of it every now and then
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Thank you! That sounds like a book I should read!
With the walnuts, I allowed them to fall to the ground. Hundreds of seedlings germinated. I allowed them to stay in the ground the first winter. By spring, many had perished, some died back. The few that looked perfectly healthy got transplanted to the colder climate. Some survived, and thrived.
With the current generation, in a different setting, I harvest the seeds, and plant them directly into the next colder climate in a wildlands setting, so they get even less attention.
I suspect that many of the “wild native” species received significant domestication, which dramatically changed their characteristics and distribution.
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I am conducting research on some of these topics as part of a writing project. My understanding of the academic sources on prehistoric North American agriculture is that your explanation of “wild native” domestication on a grand scale is consistent with the existing evidence.
These are highlights two sources I’m drawing from about southeast North America. 
I don’t have any equivalent sources for other regions, except what I am starting to learn from the Center of Origin course here at Going to Seed.
These sources are a bit more focused on how these mast and fruit forests were managed and maintained than how they were planted. So I suggest that if a person has just read Joseph Lofthouse’s description of hardening walnuts above in the thread and then reads these excerpts, it might be enough to get a mental image about how mast and fruit forestry could have worked on a grand scale in ancient times in North America.
Native Americans as active and passive promoters of mast and fruit trees in the eastern USA
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683608095581
abrams-nowacki-2008-native-americans-as-active-and-passive-promoters-of-mast-and-fruit-trees-in-the-eastern-usa.pdf (301.7 KB)
edit: This article isn’t available to the public online, so attached this PDF. Please enjoy it but don’t reshare it outside of the group.
Native Americans were a much more important ignition source than lightning throughout the eastern USA, except for the extreme Southeast. First-hand accounts often mention mast and fruit trees or orchards in the immediate vicinity of Native American villages and suggest that these trees existed as a direct result of Indian management, including cultivation and planting. We conclude that Native American land-use practices not only had a profound effect on promoting mast and fruit trees but also on the entire historical development of the eastern oak and pine forests, savannas and tall-grass prairies… [W]e attribute the multimillennia domination of the eastern biome by prairie grasses, berry-producing shrubs and/or mast trees primarily to regular burning and other forms of management by Indians to meet their gastronomic needs. Otherwise, drier prairie and open woodlands would have converted to closed-canopy forests and more mesic mast trees would have succeeded to more shade-tolerant, fire-sensitive trees that are a significantly inferior dietary resource.
Bison, anthropogenic fire, and the origins of agriculture in eastern North America
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019620961119
In eastern North America, Indigenous people created a biodiverse domesticated landscape during the mid-Holocene (Smith and Yarnell, 2009). This landscape included agriculture without flood management or irrigation along the Mississippi river and its tributaries, a land management choice that preserved the rich aquatic animal and plant foods of the floodplains. Ancient Indigenous people also extensively burned, which decreased the density of forests and increased the prevalence of fire-loving species. These changes in forest structure and composition increased the abundance of acorns (Quercus spp.), hickory nuts (Carya spp.), chestnuts (Castanea dentata), hazelnuts (Corylus americana), and wild fruits, as well as game, by creating edges and clearings (Delcourt and Delcourt, 2004; Nowacki and Abrams, 2008).
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It has long been recognized that Indigenous people maintained the open canopy oak-hickory forests that were sources of nuts, fruits, and game using fire and other techniques (Abrams and Nowacki, 2008). Increasingly, ecologists also accept that the eastern prairies of the late Holocene were deliberately maintained by people (Anderson, 2006), but current archeological data and theories make it hard to understand why ancient people managed prairies.
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The interaction between burning and grazing is also relevant in the context of millennia of anthropogenic burning in eastern North America discussed above. Fulendorf and Engle showed that patchy fires create “grazing focal points” within the prairie, and that bison spend the majority of their time grazing these recently burned areas (Fuhlendorf and Engle, 2001). Bison prefer to create new wallows in these areas, as well (Coppedge and Shaw, 2000). This behavior may increase the probability of dispersing seeds to recently burned locations. Bison dung burns hotter than woody fuels (Crockett and Engle, 1999), creating a potential for a feedback loop where burning leads to intensive grazing, and dung concentrations create good conditions for future burns. Burning may thus have both attracted extremely valuable prey (bison) and created niches for annual seedbearing plants, from the perspective of ancient foragers.
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Fascinating!
I remember, many years ago, being taught that all humans used to be hunter-gatherers, and then way more food started to be produced (I now highly question this assumption, which seems to have been based on a lot of arrogance and no evidence) when many civilizations switched to immobile agriculture instead.
I remember thinking back then, “Am I missing something? Why didn’t hunter-gatherers collect seeds from plants they liked and sprinkle them in empty spaces? Why didn’t they pull out plants they didn’t like in order to create those empty spaces? Why didn’t they hunt-and-gather on a regular rotation, so they could come back and harvest again in places they were regularly tending? Wouldn’t that result in way more food for only a little effort?”
Well, duh. They did.
And they do. And they do a whole lot more, too.
Hunter-gatherer societies are smart. And I’m starting to suspect that they’ve always been smarter at long-term, nutrient-rich food production than the society I grew up in.
They’re probably even better at quantity of food production, when you consider this:
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Plenty of agricultural societies never developed into what Anthropologists call “Early States”. If their agriculture was based on beans, tubers, or bananas, they just kept on agriculturing.
It was the advent of Grains that created hoardable, appropriable wealth and power. When your currency ripens all at once out in the open, strong people could take what they wanted.
But tree crops and a diverse set of wild foods are so much more reliable than grains, more nourishing, and often require less work. “barbarians”, the hillfolk who didn’t want to work hard for wealth, alcohol, and prestige, lived much healthier lives by the fossil record.
That’s not to say that trees should be left “wild”. I think our bigger allies are along for the ride as long as we do our part. We gotta keep planting those seeds.
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Absolutely! I think anytime we can create a win-win situation, we should do it. We get bigger, tastier fruit, and the trees that make it get to reproduce more often? Win-win situation! Win-win-win, in fact, if we are also willing to share some with other animals.
In fact, I would argue that if we really want to fulfill our contract with the trees, we must plant seeds! Cloning and grafting are perfectly fine as a supplement, not a replacement, for growing new genotypes of the species. The trees are feeding us in good faith. We need to fill our end of the bargain, and make sure they are allowed to have new, genetically distinct children, so that the species can keep on adapting.
A living species is like a living language. It needs to be allowed to change. And it’s perfectly fine to make deliberate choices to guide those changes in a direction you want, as long as there are mutual benefits.
In fact, I would say this is even more broad-reaching.
If we humans use our cleverness to figure out solutions to not only our species’s problems, but also the problems of every other species, we can turn this world into a paradise for everybody.
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