- The pros and cons of biofortified cassava rehearsed for the nth time.
- Scientists accused of biopiracy for the nth time.
- nth genetic study of ancient farmers. Men moved, in a nutshell, women not so much.
- Traditional healers: nth example of a group hard hit by climate change.
- In all above cases, n is a large positive integer.
- Potatoes responsible for about 25% of Old World population increase between 1700 and 1900. Nice maths.
- Learn how to conserve pollinators. If you’re in Rhode Island. But there is an online Pollinator Conservation Resource Center with lots of resources.
Causation sought between seed banks and vitamin D deficiency
Google has a new thing where you put in a search term and it tells you what other terms showed a similar pattern of search over time since 2004, at least in the US. So of course I played around with it for way too long, but pretty much nothing of interest turned up. Except for one, strange thing. It seems that the time pattern shown by searching for the term “seed bank” is very highly correlated with a number of permutations of the search for “vitamin D deficiency.” Any idea why that should be?
Nibbles: Date palm sex, Heirlooms congress, World Camel Day, Latino livestock, Coconut craft, Hybridizing Alocasia, Sami reindeer, Serbian agri-environments, Honey, Feidherbia
- Qataris work out how to sex date palms.
- The National Heirloom Exposition revs its engine.
- World Camel Day is coming up. No, really.
- Latin Americans planning their next congress on the biodiversity of domestic animals. Cuy, anyone?
- The Art of Coconut Craft. Wonderfully kitschy.
- So, you want to breed Alocasia, do you?
- Sweden stops oppressing its main minority.
- High Nature Value farming in Serbia.
- Non-wood forest products are all very well, but…
- Yes, yes, Feidherbia will solve all the problems of the Sahel, now can I go back to sleep?
Using ancient grains to remap perceptions of Central Asia
The Silk Road Symposium held at the Penn Museum in March 2011 was clearly quite a get-together, judging by the personalities involved. Some of the presentations are on Youtube, including one by Dr Michael Frachetti on “Seeds for the Soul: East/West Diffusion of Domesticated Grains,” which has been picked up and discussed by Dienekes on his blog. It’s really worth listening to the whole talk, even at 45 minutes, but in case you don’t have the time, here are the main points.
Dr Frachetti excavated at a place called Begash in Uzbekistan. This is a site which goes back to at least 2500 BC and was used by nomadic pastoralists for many centuries. The dig came up with the earliest evidence of wheat and broomcorn millet in Inner Asia, dating back to about 2200 BC. At left is what the seeds they found look like (click to enlarge).
But here’s the thing. There’s no evidence that the people living at Begash at the time actually ate these things. 1 Their teeth just don’t look like the teeth of people who have a lot of cereals in their diet. Basically, no cavities. And there was no evidence of processing either. So what was happening?
The seeds were recovered from a very particular context — a cremation burial. And only in that context. Along, incidentally, with horse remains. Both the cereals and horses were in fact ritual commodities, the excavators think. Not stuff to be consumed every day, but rather exotic commodities to be wheeled out on very special occasions to make an impression. As Dienekes points out, using wheat for funerary offerings goes on still.
Where did the cereals come from? To cut a long story short, the wheat from the west and the Panicum millet from the east. 2 Which is the reason why Dr Frachetti thinks we need to remap our thinking about Central Asia. It’s not so much that the people who inhabited these regions were peripheral to the great Bronze Age civilizations, but rather (or, perhaps, also) that they were the link between them.
The 8th annual Great Lakes Indigenous Farming Conference passes us by
…Caroline [Chartrand] and about 100 other indigenous farmers and gardeners—along with students and community members—gathered in March on the White Earth reservation in Northern Minnesota to share knowledge, stories, and, of course, seeds.
Don’t know how we missed this from yes! magazine a couple of weeks back. In particular as one of the stories was about Pawnee corn, a topic we have covered here a number of times.