- Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. Different stages of adopting and intensifying the use of domesticates (livestock, horses, and later crops) reshaped economies, mobility, and social organization in north-central Asia, ultimately enabling the emergence of the Silk Road. So domesticated species were as active drivers of Eurasian historical development as of prehistory.
- Ancient grains illuminate the mosaic origin of domesticated wheat. Domesticated wheat arose through repeated hybridizations between distinct wild populations carrying complementary non-shattering spike mutations, followed by ongoing gene flow and regional adaptation, making domestication a prolonged and interconnected process. Long before the result got to the Silk Road.
- A single hybrid origin of cultivated peanut. Domestication of the peanut seems to have been easier than that of wheat.
- A synthetic eco-evolutionary proposal for the conservation of wild relatives of the olive tree. If we ever have to re-domesticate the olive, we should make sure these 53 wild populations are conserved.
- Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200. I wonder what the Sahelian equivalent of the Silk Road was.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18th century CE Waikato Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. At least some Maori ate predominantly sweet potato and taro during the Traditional Period. Which of course were brought to Aotearoa via the ara moana, which, stretching a point, is the South Pacific equivalent of the Silk Road.
- Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa. Yeah, but who needs domesticated species anyway.
- Fermentation as food pedagogy: insights into how teaching fermentation facilitates engagement with the food system. Are fermentation microbes domesticated?
Brainfood: Clonal crops edition
- Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France. Vegetative propagation of grapevines has been going on since the Iron Age.
- High-throughput olive germplasm classification using morphological phenotyping and machine learning. Olive may be generally vegetatively propagated, but you still have to characterize the fruits.
- Varietal Diversity Analysis of Date Palm and Identification of High Agro-Economic Genotypes in Middle Draa. About half of of the date palms in the middle Draa of Morocco are actually from seed. That makes their diversity difficult to conserve.
- Genebank tools for efficient management of viral infections in tropical clonal crops. All those clonal crops need to be kept clean in genebanks. Here’s how.
- Genome degradation in plant tissue culture. All those clonal crops also need to be kept genetically stable in genebanks, and it can be tricky.
A mycelial thread through human history
A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological record might suggest. In fact, they contributed to diets, health and social organisation, and even fire-making. Here’s a quick summary of what new analytical techniques in archaeology, sometimes linked with ethnography, are revealing, according to the article.
Fire technology (Mesolithic to Neolithic): Polypore fungi, especially Fomes fomentarius, were deliberately harvested, cut, scorched and processed into amadou. This is a felt-like, highly flammable material that people used as portable tinder, forming compact fire-starting kits together with birch bark and pyrite.
Food (Palaeolithic, including Neanderthals): Evidence from dental plaque DNA shows consumption of multiple species (e.g. gray shag, split gill, porcini), suggesting diets were more diverse than has been assumed. Mushrooms may partially explain isotopic signals previously attributed to meat consumption.
Medicine: A Neanderthal individual consumed grasses containing penicillin-producing mould, possibly to treat a dental abscess. Later, Ötzi the Iceman (~3300 BCE) carried amadou, but also birch polypore mushrooms. These may have had medicinal purposes (anti-parasitic, antimicrobial), though they were not found in the stomach, so a new hypothesis suggests they may have been used as fishing floats, based on morphology and experimental replication.
Subsistence and resource extraction: Polypores and puffballs may have been burned to produce smoke to anaesthetise bees, making harvesting honey a lot easier.
Fermentation (Neolithic): Moulds such as Monascus enabled enzymatic conversion of rice starch to sugars, facilitating alcohol production by the so-called “red qu” method. Pottery residues in East Asia show evidence of such brewing some 10,000 years ago, much earlier than originally thought. Fermented beverages were likely used in ritual, mortuary, and communal contexts and may have contributed to social cohesion, identity formation and early political and religious structures.
Brainfood: Animal diversity edition
- Livestock grazing boosts plant diversity in the Greater Serengeti–Mara Ecosystem. Livestock can be good for biodiversity conservation. But can its diversity be conserved too? Let’s see.
- Conservation and Management of Animal Genetic Resources in the Context of African Livestock Production Systems: The Case for In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation. “The multi-stakeholder breeders-researchers-decision-makers approach remains the most robust solution for sound management and preservation of biological units.” What, no farmers and local communities? No, that’s unfair: community-based conservation is discussed. But it doesn’t feel as central to the whole thing as it should be, somehow.
- Genetic Diversity, Adaptation, Wild Introgression, and Coat Color Mutation of Golden Yak. After all, local communities have maintained the golden yak reasonably well.
- Caprine dairy exploitation on the Iranian Plateau from the seventh millennium BC. Not to mention goats in Iran, and for thousands of years…
- Old goats: 3,000 years of genetic connectivity of the domestic goat in Ireland. …and in Ireland, though for not quite as long, admittedly.
- Dogs were widely distributed across western Eurasia during the Palaeolithic. And local communities have been managing dog populations since way before farming even.
- The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago. Also, local communities managed early cats separately in the Levant and Egypt. Much later than dogs, but that’s cats for you.
- A microbiome catalog of Chinese traditional artisanal cheeses provides insights into functional and microbial diversity. And don’t forget to conserve the associated microbiome too. I wonder what golden yak cheese is like.
Brainfood: History edition
- Phylogenetics and evolution of Digitaria grasses, including cereal crops fonio, raishan and Polish millet. The history of wild Digitaria goes back 2–6 million years.
- Biogeography of Crop Progenitors and Wild Plant Resources in the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka. This is what the distribution of crop wild relatives looked like in West Asia 10 thousand years ago or thereabouts. No Digitaria, but plenty of other stuff.
- Ancient use and long-distance transport of the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii) across the Colorado Plateau: Implications for early stages of domestication. At roughly the same time, a couple continents and an ocean over, a local potato species was being processed outside its rage. Was it cultivated? Do the math.
- State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing. And a few thousand years later, there were domesticated grains, states, and taxes. In that order. Do the math.
- The Archaeology of Olive Oil Production in Roman and Pre-Roman Italy. Pretty sure the Romans had a state and taxes. They also had domesticated olives.
- Wines of Fire and Earth: Exploring the Volcanic Terroirs of the Canary Islands – a Case Study. No Romans on the Canaries, but plenty of vines.
- Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses. The Romans and their successors, with their cereals, olives and grapes, were surprisingly good for landscape floristic diversity. The Black Death, not so much.
- The decades-old fantasy of enhancing pigeonpea productivity. Well that’s a bit of a letdown after a 6 million year journey.
- Past, present and future of local crop evolution. That’s because we needed Indigenous people and local communities to show us the way.