Category: Archaeology

Posted on

Bringing back the aurochs

From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.

Anyone who has seen Jurassic Park (and who hasn’t) will understand how this film has stirred the imagination by suggesting the possibility of bringing back species that have long gone extinct. Add to that the recent breakthroughs in our ability to retrieve and decipher genomes obtained from tissues of animals that have perished thousands of years ago and you can understand the excitement. Italian scientists now claim to have a rough draft of the genome of the aurochs, a wild bovid that roamed Europe until perhaps as late as the 17th century and which is depicted so beautifully in the cave paintings in Lascaux. With the genome map as a compass the Italians are convinced that they can now breed back the aurochs using contemporary cattle breeds as a starting point.

Such attempts are, of course, not new and there are bovids around that are thought to resemble the aurochs. But in the past such efforts were always fraught with a fair degree of uncertainty because they relied entirely on phenotypic information gleaned from drawings or written descriptions. Having actual genetic information of the aurochs takes that uncertainty out of the equation. Whether the Italians’ efforts will be more successful is hard to predict because they are based on the assumption that all of the genetic information of the aurochs can still be found somewhere in modern cattle. And it is far from clear whether that is the case. But even if it isn’t, having the aurochs genome at hand, it may one day be possible to make the necessary genetic changes to transform a modern cattle embryo into an aurochs embryo and have that embryo then carried to term in a modern cow. And if you can bring back the aurochs, it may quite well be possible to bring back animal breeds that have similarly vanished. Still sounds a bit like science fiction? Perhaps, but nobody ever thought you could clone a sheep.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Nibbles: School gardens, Nabhan, Reforestation, Swine flu, Boar, Nutrinomics, Medieval sheep, Market, Acacia, Livestock breeds, Bees, Buffalo breeding, Quinoa

Posted on

Amazonian agriculture analyzed

I don’t know about you, but in my laziness I sometimes catch myself making the assumption that a centre of crop origin is also one of crop diversity. That is of course sometimes the case, but by no means always, as Vavilov himself recognized. A recent open access paper in Diversity makes the point very clearly. ((Clement, C., de Cristo-Araújo, M., d’Eeckenbrugge, G., Alves Pereira, A., & Picanço-Rodrigues, D. (2010). Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops. Diversity, 2 (1), 72-106 DOI: 10.3390/d2010072))

The authors, led by Charles R. Clement of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Manaus, review molecular studies and also bring in archaeological and other evidence in their discussion of the history of Amazonian crops. They come to the conclusion that these crops originated around the periphery of the region: “All but one of the species examined originated in the periphery of Amazonia (Figure 3), rather than along the major white water rivers where pre-conquest population densities were greatest.” Here’s that Fig. 3:

Now, in contrast, here’s where the pre-Columbian hotspots of diversity were to be found: “The major centers and regions of diversity are along the major white water rivers and in northwestern Amazonia, where ethnic diversity is extremely high.”

The explanation, according to the authors, is the length of time involved in the development of agriculture in the region.

Because crop domestication began thousands of years before food production systems became important, it is not at all surprising to see a dramatic contrast such as that in Amazonia.

Why was the Amazonian periphery such a focus of domestication?

It is possible that sufficient natural resources were available [in central Amazonia] so that the home gardens were such a small fraction of subsistence that they are difficult to find in the archaeological record. In contrast, in the headwaters of the same rivers in the periphery, less abundant aquatic resources may have increased the importance of home gardens.