- New Agriculturist focuses on neglected species.
- Chocolate, wine… Fellow could have himself a pretty good weekend in Vegas with that lot.
- Irish evaluate biodiversity, apparently ignore agriculture.
- Sasa schemes to save Scottish landraces.
- The Indian Seed and Patent Acts dissected.
Cassava around the world
Maybe it was hanging out at CIAT recently, but I seem to see cassava stories everywhere lately. Whether it’s chips for schools in Trinidad, or ethanol production in PNG, or breeding for disease resistance in Uganda, this tuber is everywhere. And don’t even get me started on the cassava revolution happening in Nigeria. International Year of Cassava anyone?
Nibbles: reindeer
- Reindeer vary in domesticability, have been independently domesticated a couple of times. Santa Claus unavailable for comment.
Biocultural diversity podcasts
There’s a one-hour interview with Luisa Maffi of Terralingua online at Agricultural Innovations on the connections between biodiversity, culture and language. Fascinating.
Was sunflower domesticated in Mexico or what?
I don’t know much about sunflower. That’s obvious enough from the cavalier fashion in which a recent Nibble of mine referred to a press release on a PNAS paper on sunflower domestication by David Lentz and others. 1 Briefly, that paper presented a range of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence for the domestication of sunflower in Mexico by 2600 BC. This would complement a separate, independent, well-attested domestication in the Mississippi Valley. That’s important not only academically but also for the insights it would give into genetic structure within the species, and hence possible breeding strategies.
But it looks like I unwittingly walked into a bit of a controversy. It seems things are a bit more complex than the press release made out. In a 2007 short communication in GRACE, the great Charles Heiser reverses himself with regards to some archaeobotanical material he had previously identified as a sunflower achene and as a result comes out against the Mexican domestication for the crop first advocated by Lentz in 2001. The available molecular evidence seems to support Heiser.
I don’t know much about sunflower. But after today, I know a little bit more. And I’ll be keeping an eye on this academic spat to learn more.