Silphium rediscovered?

Luigi dug up this great article — Devil’s Dung: The World’s Smelliest Spice — which reveals more about asafoetida than you could possibly ever have wanted to know. Lord but it is strange stuff to cook with, and yet I do like what it does for a dish. But I digress. Buried in a sidebar near the bottom of the page is a claim, complete with coy question mark, that silphium, most prized spice of ancient Rome, might be alive and well. The article recounts the history of silphium, and how it was believed to have gone extinct by the 1st century CE, so I won’t repeat that here. It also mentions the possibility that Cachrys ferulacea and ancient silphium are one and the same. ((GBIF doesn’t yet know about the record from Cyrenia.)) Personally, I have no idea, and I’m not even sure I know how one would know, but I’m intrigued. Thanks Luigi.

Anthropologists and geneticists see the origin of agriculture in different ways

Dorian Fuller has answered Paul Gepts’ comment on Dorian’s post at The Archaeobotanist on the multiple origin of agriculture, which I originally blogged about a few days ago. Let’s remind ourselves of the argument.

This was Dorian’s parting statement on the original post:

…agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways.

Paul Gepts countered with this:

As a geneticist, I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue… biochemical and molecular data also show distinct, and likely, independent domestication in different geographical areas, not among only among different crops, but also within a crop gene pool.

And now Dorian again:

My sense is that most of the genetics community has shifted towards seeing multiple areas of independent origin, but within archaeology there is still a penchant for reducing historical complexities to as few origins as possible — often focusing on where more archaeological research has taken place rather than considering other forms of evidence (biogeography, genetics) that should encourage us to take up research in the less-explored or unexplored areas.

Read the full exchange.

Nibbles: Urban bees, Borlaug, Cotton, Income, Mammals, Human disease, Caribou, Chestnut, IRRI

  • Nibbles: Dogs squared, Afghanistan’s poppies, Rice at IRRI, Book on sapodilla chicle in Mexico, Opuntia, Trees

    • DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
    • Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
    • “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
    • “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
    • “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
    • Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
    • TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.