Dr Roland Bourdeix is a senior researcher at CIRAD and an honorary research fellow at Bioversity International. He’s long worked on coconut genetic resources conservation and use, including at the Marc Delorme Research Station. He’s now in the South Pacific on a mission — in collaboration with my old pals at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community — to collect a famous Samoan coconut variety, and you can follow his progress on his new blog.
Mexico develops its agro-ecotourism offer
Ah, to get lost on the Tequila Trail!
The many uses of dung
Irish botanists are using fungi that grow on cattle and sheep dung to study the history of farming in the Burren. Interesting enough in its own right, but it also reminded me that coprophagus organisms have been used in another part of the world, to the same end.
Documenting the farming transition around the world
Two recent papers shed light on that grey area where hunter-gatherers become farmers. From northern China, archaeological evidence is showing that 8,000 years ago it was highly mobile foraging bands interested in feeding not only themselves but also, interestingly, their hunting dogs, who in effect invented millet — that’s broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) — cultivation. This was later taken up and intensified by what are known as the Late Banpo Phase millet agriculturalists.
A thousand years previously, and half a world away, archaeological, paleoecological, linguistic and genetic data from the SW United States seems to suggest that “maize moved northward from central Mexico to [the] Southwest by being passed from one hunter-gatherer band to the next, who incorporated the crop into their subsistence economies and eventually became farmers themselves.” Not, that is, as a result of the movement of Mexican agriculturalists, which was the alternative scenario. Nothing to do with feeding their livestock in this case, though. Turkeys seem to have been domesticated much later.
Nibbles: Drugs, Chains, Data, Year, Svalbard, Twitter, Laurel
- Opium gene decoded. Is that good?
- ILRI shares a bunch of presentations on value chains. Can’t be bad.
- Missouri Botanical Garden opens Center for Biodiversity Informatics. Will any good come of it?
- Agri scientists promote 2010 as biodiversity year. But that should have read Bioversity International. Bad.
- Wild edibles could hold key to protecting food supply? They mean wild relatives, of course. Very bad.
- More on our Twitter feed. You following us, right? Good!
- Beware the Ides of March! Laurel wreath bad for some.