The case for the prosecution: Kenyans are losing their food culture. The case for the defence: traditional foods are being revived and this is attracting the attentions of multinational. I suspect the truth, as ever, is somewhere in between. How so very boring.
What percentage Neolithic are you?
A big new human genetics paper in PLOS has been making a big splash. It tries to distinguish between two extreme possibilities about the people of Europe:
- Europeans are descended from Middle Eastern farmers, who brought their Neolithic cultural toolkit less than 10,000 years ago.
- Europeans are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who acculturated to the farming way of life through diffusion of ideas.
The title gives it away: “A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for European Paternal Lineages.” Based on one key Y-chromosome haplotype, it goes for the first option, which is a similar result to studies using mtDNA, although other studies do not agree quite so much. Those old hunter-gatherers — or their genetic traces at any rate — are only to be found in Finland now. The rest of us Europeans can trace our origin to a greater or lesser extent back to the first farmers, those who built Çatalhöyük, for example. Until, that is, the next big new human genetics paper.
Featured: I fought the law
Andre gets to the heart of the Kokopelli spat, I fear:
Humping from one blog to another, you can see that it is very, very personal between former friends, and very ugly.
Do have your say too.
Helping Haiti
Difficult to say anything new about what’s going on in Haiti. It is all sad beyond belief. WWF is rightly encouraging people to give. Seconded. UNEP has announced an environmental recovery effort. There’s no shortage of advice on what must be done. FAO is trying to raise money to support food production in fields and homegardens. The planting season starts in March, so time is short. Meanwhile, CABI’s blog looked at the underlying food security problems.
I haven’t come across any information on what’s happened to the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation Agricole (MARNDR), but I don’t hold out much hope. It housed the national germplasm collection of 513 beans and 54 maize accessions. SINGER lists 233 accessions from Haiti, almost all rice (48), beans (113) and maize (67). GRIN lists 111 (almost all rice, maize, cotton, beans). 1 At first sight it seems that maybe most of the stuff that is in MARNDR should be findable elsewhere, though that’s quite a lot of beans.
LATER: IFPRI DG has his say too.
Nibbles: School gardens, Nabhan, Reforestation, Swine flu, Boar, Nutrinomics, Medieval sheep, Market, Acacia, Livestock breeds, Bees, Buffalo breeding, Quinoa
- Resource list for setting up a school garden. Take that, Flanagan.
- Gary “Eco-gastronaut” Nabhan goes viral.
- Smithsonian goes native. Trees, that is.
- GRAIN video delves into origin of H1N1.
- There are boar farms of England?
- Nutrition advice needs to take genetics into account.
- Tracing the changing morphology of British post-medieval sheep. Well, someone has to do it.
- Thai floating market. A tourist trap, I know. But photogenic.
- Kew’s plant of the day is gum arabic. Wait, Kew has a plant of the day? Is there no end to their ingenuity?
- And GlobalDiv has a Breed of the Month. BTW, the same source has a thing on the XVIII Plant and Animal Genome Conference (Jan. 2010).
- Diverse diet for healthier bees, says BBC
- Breeding bovines in Asia.
- Cursed quinoa.