- Grinding, fermenting, and detoxifying our way to bigger brains — an anthropologist makes the case that food processing, historically women’s work, did as much for human evolution as the mammoth-spearing got credit for.
- Speaking of transforming raw ingredients into something civilization-defining: a Japanese temple has been quietly perfecting vegan cooking for 700 years, no marketing department required.
- Meanwhile in the Philippines, Naturland, the international association for organic farming from Germany, is linking up with Global Seed Savers Philippines, to help farmers get their hands on indigenous crop diversity before it disappears.
- If you want to see what “future-proofing seeds” looks like at scale, the National Soybean Germplasm Collection just turned 100: a century of squirreling away soybean diversity, just in case.
- Kazakhstan wants in on the squirreling too: plans are moving forward for a new genebank to safeguard agricultural biodiversity across Islamic Organization for Food Security member states.
- The University of Reading is also 100, and in celebration scientists there harvested beans from its cacao collection (yes, it has a cacao collection) to make Britain’s first homegrown chocolate bar since 1932, a novelty act with a serious undertone: climate change is squeezing cacao’s traditional growing belt.
- And in Italy, the squeeze is already showing up on the balance sheet: Parmesan’s “Fort Knox” — $350 million of cheese squirreled away as loan collateral — is feeling the heat, with rising cooling costs and falling yields rattling wine and olive oil too.
The fruits of migration
As chance would have it, following my recent speculative foray into the possible connection between language and crop diversity, an essay by the great Andrea Wulf 1 has just appeared that tells the story of how a remarkable German naturalist used breadfruit and linguistics to work out Polynesian migration patterns long before DNA or archaeology could confirm them.
George Forster sailed with his father aboard the HMS Resolution on Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775) and encountered breadfruit across the South Pacific. He noticed that the trees were seedless and could only be propagated by root cuttings. And also that there didn’t seem to be wild breadfruit trees anywhere in the islands. That meant every tree he saw, and there were many of them, had been deliberately planted by people.
Digging through the university library back in Göttingen, Forster later found that wild, seeded breadfruit with little flesh do exist, but in Southeast Asia. If the Pacific islands only had the improved, seedless types, he reasoned, they must have been carried there by people. That was proof both of sophisticated Polynesian plant management and of a migration route running from Southeast Asia eastward across the Pacific.
Forster combined this with careful attention to language. He deduced that most Pacific languages he encountered were dialects of a single root language, with small, systematic sound shifts. He and his father also charted how the presence of Malay loanwords decreased the farther east an island was located, which suggested that islands closer to Southeast Asia — the home of Malay — were settled earlier.
Where his fellow naturalist Joseph Banks saw the breadfruit purely as an economic resource (later lobbying to transplant it to the West Indies to feed enslaved plantation workers, hence HMS Bounty and all that), Forster saw it as historical and ethnographic evidence. That’s a strikingly different, more humanistic and — to me at least — more appealing way of reading a plant.
Wulf then jumps forward to modern archaeology and genetics, which broadly confirm Forster’s reconstruction. There was an initial human population in the region of Papua New Guinea dating back 45,000 years. This was followed by a second, Austronesian-speaking wave migrating out of Taiwan and thereabouts around 3,500 years ago. They travelled by the stars in “outrigger or double-hulled canoes loaded with hogs, chickens, root vegetables, coconuts, bananas, and breadfruit seedlings.” And they mixed with the descendants of the earlier wave through Melanesia. Their own descendants eventually reached Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and, much later, Tahiti, Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.
The essay closes by tying this to Tongan historian Epeli Hau’ofa’s idea of “Oceania” — the Pacific not as scattered, isolated islands, lost in a vast ocean, but as one interconnected “sea of islands.” Exactly what Forster intuited two centuries before it became conventional wisdom.
We’ve blogged a lot about breadfruit over the years. Check out the archive. And in particular listen to the recently-retired Dr Diane Ragone describe her 40-year journey to understand this remarkable tree.
A Babel of agrobiodiversity
“The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene” by Blasi, Hamilton, Gray & Bowern, published in Science last month, does something I really love. It complicates a standard narrative.
The received story of language diversity is that it has been declining steadily for centuries, largely driven by colonialism and globalization. But direct evidence is scarce and recent: writing only reliably takes us back about 6,000 years. So the team combined ethnographic data from 171 hunter-gatherer and fisher societies, paleodemographic estimates of global population, and statistical and social-computational modelling to reconstruct plausible trajectories of global language diversity over the 12,000 years of the Holocene, which began after the last major ice age, triggering the birth of agriculture.
At the beginning of this period, they estimate there were roughly 4,500–6,200 languages. That’s actually fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today. Language diversity then increased through most of the Holocene, driven by the population growth engendered by agriculture, reaching a peak between about 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when the models suggest that tens of thousands of languages may have existed. That’s an order of magnitude more than today.
Then came a major collapse. The authors argue that the decline in linguistic diversity began with the expansion of large states and empires, long before European colonialism. Expanding populations and their languages, cultures and institutions displaced smaller ones. Today’s languages are therefore “survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck.” They persist because the populations speaking them expanded. Extinction, the authors argue, has shaped linguistic and cultural diversity far more — and for longer — than we have appreciated.
Now, there are obvious caveats. The authors are modelling linguistic diversity, not measuring it. Their estimates depend on heroic assumptions about early ethnolinguistic group sizes, global population and the relationship between population and language number. Regional histories could have been very different, and the model can’t reconstruct individual episodes of extinction caused by war, disease or environmental change.
But the paper provides a provocative template for thinking about diversity more generally. It suggests that population growth can initially generate diversity; but expanding societies can subsequently erase it through homogenization.
And that makes me wonder about agricultural biodiversity. You saw that coming, I’m sure.
I’m not suggesting that crop diversity followed the same pattern as language diversity through the Holocene. We simply don’t have the evidence to say that, though it’s an intriguing thought. But could we borrow the methodology? Could we reconstruct plausible trajectories of crop or agricultural-system diversity from fragmentary archaeological, ethnobotanical, genetic and demographic evidence?
Rather than assuming that agricultural diversity was vast and stable in the distant past, happy in its Vavilovian centres, and has been declining recently, perhaps we might end up complicating the familiar genetic erosion narrative too. That would be worthwhile. And fun.
Brainfood: Animal genetic resources
- Beyond the binary: Queer inclusion and invisible labour in Samoa’s fisheries value chains. Fisheries in Samoa depend on significant but largely unrecognized labour by LGBTQ+ people, particularly fa’afafine and fa’afatama, whose contributions are overlooked by policies based on rigid gender categories.
- Genetic and morphological diversity of indigenous chicken of Kenya: A Review. Kenya’s indigenous chickens are adapted to diverse environments, resilient to disease, and important for rural livelihoods.
- Uncovering the lives of rock doves (Columba livia) in Late Bronze Age Hala Sultan Tekke, Cyprus. Rock doves lived alongside people in a major Late Bronze Age port city, revealing a more complex relationship than simple domestication in which doves exploited urban environments while providing food and other resources.
- Farmed Escapees Threaten MHC Diversity in Wild Atlantic Salmon. Escaped farmed Atlantic salmon can erode the diversity of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes in wild populations through interbreeding, which could reduce the long-term resilience and adaptability of wild salmon.
- Creation of intermuscular bone-free genetic mutants in grass carp and multiomics reveals molecular regulatory basis. Genome editing was used to produce grass carp lacking the numerous fine intermuscular bones that reduce consumer appeal, opening new possibilities for breeding more marketable fish while deepening understanding of skeletal biology.
Brainfood: Seeds through time
- Natufian sickle blades (ca. 15,000–11,700 cal. BP) reveal cereal cultivation ca. 4.5 millennia before domestication. Archaeological evidence from ancient sickle blades suggests that people were harvesting cereal seeds thousands of years before domesticated forms emerged, blurring the line between foraging and farming, and offering fresh insight into the long co-evolution of humans and crops.
- Teosinte alleles enhance nitrogen assimilation and seed protein in maize. Wild relatives continue to provide valuable genetic resources for the improvement of crop seeds.
- Modeling seed germination data to meet biodiversity conservation needs in the Mediterranean. Robust germination models can improve both restoration planning and ex situ conservation by predicting when and how seeds are most likely to establish.
- To grow or not to grow: questioning seed dormancy and thermal germination responses along elevational gradients in four plant taxa. Seed dormancy does not always follow predictable patterns across environmental gradients.
- Delayed Seed Germination as a Strategy to Cope With Environmental Stress and Disturbance. Seed dormancy follows a (fairly) predictable pattern when you look at stress and disturbance.
- Reconsidering how to dry orthodox seeds for improved ex situ conservation outcomes. Conventional wisdom about drying orthodox seeds before storage may deserve re-evaluation, and refining drying protocols could enhance long-term viability and strengthen the effectiveness of seed banks.
- Short periods dominate mast seeding across diverse tree species. A broad analysis of mast seeding reveals that many tree species synchronize seed production over relatively short recurring intervals rather than highly irregular cycles.