- The genomic footprints of wild Saccharum species trace domestication, diversification, and modern breeding of sugarcane. The genome of modern sugarcane is a mosaic of wild introgressions, including one from an unknown source.
- Evolutionary histories of functional mutations during the domestication and spread of japonica rice in Asia. Selection by biotic stresses acted differently on standing variation in rice across geographic regions. Colour me surprised.
- Ancient DNA from lentils (Lens culinaris) illuminates human-plant-culture interactions in the Canary Islands. Local lentils trace back a thousand years in the Canaries.
- An olive parentage atlas: founder cultivars, regional diversification, and implications for breeding programs. Modern cultivars derive from a surprisingly small set of founding genotypes…
- Intraspecific variation and phenotypic plasticity of olive varieties in response to contrasting environmental conditions. …but cultivated olives maintain high within-species variation and plasticity, enabling adaptation across Mediterranean environments.
- Deciphering the Origins of Commercial Sweetpotato Genotypes Using International Genebank Data. One Brazilian sweetpotato traced back to a CIP accession with a different name, but others did not match anything in the genebank.
- Exploring genetic diversity and selective signatures, a journey through Colombian cassava’s landscape. Colombia’s farmers and environments have shaped its cassava diversity. No word on whether any of it traces back to the CIAT genebank.
- Novel germplasm of tepary and other Phaseolus bean wild relatives from dry areas of southwestern USA. The available genepool for bean breeding gets a welcome boost.
- Insight into root system architecture of buckwheat through genome-wide association mapping-first study. Want drought-resilient, high-yielding buckwheat varieties? Here are the genes — and genotypes — to play with. So the available genepool doesn’t need a boost?
- Non-destructive prediction of nitrogen, iron and zinc content in diverse common bean seeds from a genebank using near-infrared spectroscopy. High-throughput, non-destructive phenotyping methods capture nutritional trait variation across a bean core collection. Wild teparies unavailable for comment.
- Germplasm exploration and digital phenotyping reveal indigenous diversity and farmer preferences in pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.) for climate-smart breeding. Not all phenotyping can be high-throughput, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful, at least in pigeon peas.
- Agricultural landscape genomics to increase crop resilience. Could have been applied to all of the above, I guess.
Nibbles: Ancient Mexican seedbank, Indian millets, Foraged foods, Soybean breeding, Apple breeding, Albanian heirlooms, Bangladesh fish genebank
- People in the Nejapan Sierra Sur in Oaxaca, Mexico had a seed bank 400-700 years ago so they could re-create their complex cuisine after disruptions.
- How MSSRF revived millets in Odisha, India. You think a seed bank was involved?
- Meanwhile, in Meghalaya (also India), foraged foods are helping to diversify state-provided school lunches and address chronic malnutrition. Talk about complex cuisine. Are all these species in a seed bank somewhere, though? Do they need to be?
- How the National Soybean Germplasm Collection at the Agricultural Research Service lab in Urbana, Illinois helped save soybeans in Iowa.
- University breeding programmes are keeping the apple afloat in the USA. That and genebanks.
- Farmers and agrotourism are bringing back some cool flavors in Albania. Well, that and the Albanian Gene Bank.
- Fish need genebanks too, and Bangladesh is on it. Did ancient Bangladeshis have them, I wonder?
Old knowledge, new respect
An excellent article by friend-of-the-blog Alex Chepstow-Lusty in The Conversation highlights how the Incas built resilience into their landscapes in ways that modern farmers — and policymakers for that matter — would do well to revisit. By combining dung-producing llamas, irrigated terraces and carefully placed trees, Andean communities developed agricultural systems that thrived for centuries in a very challenging, and changing, environment.
These practices weren’t stop-gaps. They were sophisticated, locally adapted strategies, tested and refined over generations, that now offer clues for how to face climate change, in the high Andes and beyond.
But here’s the challenge: how do we, in today’s world, decide which elements of Indigenous knowledge to adopt, and how to adapt them? That’s where Chad Orzel’s thoughtful essay offers a valuable perspective. He argues that subjecting traditional practices to the same rigorous scientific standards as modern innovations is not an act of dismissal: it’s an act of respect. To test Indigenous methods carefully and fairly is to take them seriously, on an equal footing with other forms of knowledge.
The Inca legacy so well documented by Alex and his collaborators shows us that ancient practices can hold real solutions for modern crises. Orzel reminds us that by evaluating them with rigour, we not only unlock their potential, but also honour the people who developed and sustained them.
Indigenous knowledge deserves both recognition and respect — and the best way to respect knowledge is to test it, and put it to work.
Brainfood: Defining domestication, Pig domestication, Archaeological orphan crops, Levant Neolithic causes, Altiplano agricultural origins, Irish cattle, Islamic Green Revolution, Ancient fish DNA, Ancient Chinese rice
- A universally applicable definition for domestication. Domestication is just evolution in anthropogenic environments.
- Early evidence for pig domestication (8,000 cal. BP) in the Lower Yangtze, South China. Evolution in anthropogenic environments can follow different pathways.
- Orphan crops of archaeology-based crop history research. Some crops are also neglected by archaeologists. Maybe because they weren’t domesticated enough?
- Catastrophic fires and soil degradation: possible association with the Neolithic revolution in the southern Levant. Domestication was caused by lightning.
- Altiplano agricultural origins was a process of economic resilience, not hardship: Isotope chemistry, zooarchaeology, and archaeobotany in the Titicaca Basin, 5.5-3.0 ka. Farming was not caused by anything so traumatic as lightning on the Altiplano.
- Changing human-cattle relationships in Ireland: a 6000-year isotopic perspective. Open land management of cattle in the Iron Age led to their central position in Irish culture. Maybe lightning was involved in clearing the land?
- Re-thinking the ‘Green Revolution’ in the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Islamic Green Revolution was down to more than just new crops and irrigation. Bit like the modern Green Revolution then?
- Roman Atlantic garum: DNA confirms sardine use and population continuity in north-western Iberia. You can characterize and compare old fish remains based on the DNA that survived fermentation at the bottom of ancient salting vats.
- Exploration of crop germplasm resources knowledge mining in Chinese ancient books: a route toward sustainable agriculture. You can characterize and compare old rice varieties based on the descriptions that survived in ancient chronicles. Maybe pig varieties too?
Is the avocado toast?
Jeremy’s latest newsletter saves me including an interesting paper on the domestication of avocado in a forthcoming Brainfood.
The often humid climate of the tropics means that ancient plant remains are few and far between, making it difficult to trace the long-term history of crops there. Thanks to a dry rock shelter in western Honduras, which preserved “an unparalleled sequence of radiocarbon-dated avocado remains,” researchers have now rewritten its ancient history. The paper is paywalled; I found out about it because one of the universities involved has just published a popular account, which in turn led me to an earlier popular report from another of the universities.
Two key milestones emerged. First, people were tending wild avocado trees as far back as 11,000 years ago. And by 7500 years ago, they had begun to select for larger fruits with tougher skins. Those ages reveal a bigger surprise; they predate the arrival of maize. The standard view is that as maize spread to new locations, it transformed foragers into farmers. The new results show that people were “fully engaged in tree cultivation upon maize’s arrival”.
The research also has a message for the modern avocado industry, 90% of whose fruits are of the single Hass variety. Because they are multiplied as clonal offsets, those trees are all genetically identical and thus all equally vulnerable to any pest, disease or climate change that affects them. The researchers point out that farmers grew avocados from seedlings for millennia, and that much of that genetic diversity lingers in remaining relict populations. As Amber VanDerwarker, lead researcher on the study, points out:
Developing new varieties through seed selection of modern domesticates and wild relict populations growing throughout Central America may provide more success in adapting trees to these changing landscapes than clonal propagation alone.