- 4000 year old lentil sprouts.
- It looks bad for cassava in SE Asia.
- Bill Gates speaks out on sustainability and productivity.
- “Gardeners must unite to save Britain’s wildlife.” We say: what about Britain’s landraces?
What’s your favourite agrobiodiversity read?
A request comes in from our friend Danny Hunter. Help him out!
Now that the noughties have drawn to a close I would like to ask colleagues what they felt were their top agricultural biodiversity reads of the decade. It might be an article or a book. It might even be a blog or one of the new fangled ways of disseminating information. It could be something general or a specific piece of work that was fundamental to our understanding of agricultural biodiversity, how it is conserved, managed, utilised. As well as the details of the article or book, a brief explanation of why you thought the work important would be much appreciated.
Kenyans confused about traditional foods
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.