- Better late than never, but tubes kinda dead today.
- CNN rounds up food museums.
- Extremely cool iPhone app maps NYC’s trees. And yet we still have genebank database hell.
- The Maya buried their history in their homes. Now, can the boffins find seeds, do their whole aDNA thing?
- French research boss explains What it will take to feed the world.
- The history of sisal in Tanzania.
Nibbles: Aubergines, Opuntia, Amazonian ag, Kenya, Swiflets, Coconut and Web 2.0, PROTA, Mexico, Fruit wild relatives
- More either-or stuff from the Guardian on the Indian GM brijal story.
- The USDA prickly pear cactus germplasm collection gets some exposure. And how many times can one say that.
- Much better title from Discover on that ancient northern Amazonian earthworks story.
- Kenyan foresters tell people to eat bamboo. Luigi’s mother-in-law politely demurs. On the other hand, she might like this.
- Swiflet farming? Swiflet farming.
- Really heated exchange on paper on coconut lethal yellowing in Yucatan develops on Google Groups. I love the internet.
- PROTA publishes expensive book on promising African plants. Promises, promises. NASA promised us the personal jetpack. Where are we with that?
- Nice summary of that Mesoamerican agricultural origins story we blogged briefly about a few days ago. So what exactly do you call hunter-gatherers who also grow crops?
- First International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops will be held March 19-23, 2011 in Davis, California on the campus of the University of California, Davis. Book early.
Nibbles: Carnival, Fish, Roman nutrition
- Blog Carnival Scientia pro Publica latest is up
- And that’s where we found Ignorance is fish. Japan hooked.
- Romans had too little milk and coeliac disease to boot.
The many uses of dung
Irish botanists are using fungi that grow on cattle and sheep dung to study the history of farming in the Burren. Interesting enough in its own right, but it also reminded me that coprophagus organisms have been used in another part of the world, to the same end.
Documenting the farming transition around the world
Two recent papers shed light on that grey area where hunter-gatherers become farmers. From northern China, archaeological evidence is showing that 8,000 years ago it was highly mobile foraging bands interested in feeding not only themselves but also, interestingly, their hunting dogs, who in effect invented millet — that’s broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) — cultivation. This was later taken up and intensified by what are known as the Late Banpo Phase millet agriculturalists.
A thousand years previously, and half a world away, archaeological, paleoecological, linguistic and genetic data from the SW United States seems to suggest that “maize moved northward from central Mexico to [the] Southwest by being passed from one hunter-gatherer band to the next, who incorporated the crop into their subsistence economies and eventually became farmers themselves.” Not, that is, as a result of the movement of Mexican agriculturalists, which was the alternative scenario. Nothing to do with feeding their livestock in this case, though. Turkeys seem to have been domesticated much later.