- Boffins to brew Jurassic Park beer.
- Boffins fingerprint weeds.
- Boffins scour arctic for antifreeze proteins.
- Boffins to reclaim Garden of Eden.
- Boffins fight to save pines in Europe.
- Boffins improve production of rice and fruits in Mekong Delta.
- Boffins to spend $US3.5billion on GM in China.
- Boffin “disgraces himself”.
- Boffin says insects are agrobiodiversity too.
- Boffin wants you to plant sunflowers and count bees. Other boffins dig up evidence of bliblical beekeeping.
- Boffins find endogenous retroviruses in sheep different to ones in wild relatives. Via.
- Boffins kill beautiful theory about pre-Columbian chickens with ugly fact.
Nibbles: Amazon, Aquaculture, Bees, ICTs, Food prices, Dates, Cats, Taro
- Not so pristine after all.
- Farming the sturgeon.
- Colony Collapse Disorder 101. And how floral scents affect pollinator behaviour.
- Presentation on how mobile phones are changing rural livelihoods.
- Urban food gardens to combat high food prices in South Africa. And a different approach in Madagascar.
- Getting dates in Saudi Arabia is becoming difficult.
- “Winged” cats.
- The importance of taro in Hawaii. Thanks, Tevita.
Nibbles: Ag origins, MSV origins, Land origins, Art,
- Podcast on the origins, history and future of agriculture. “Three annual grasses explain history.” “Wheat domesticated humans.” Etc. Richard Manning gives good value.
- The origin of Maize Streak Virus explored.
- Changes in Dutch agricultural land. More diversity in land use over time.
- More ag art. Via.
Nibbles: Hemp, Galip, Fort Collins, Dwarf cows, Persephone, Atolls
- No member of the plant kingdom has ever been so willfully and stubbornly misunderstood.
- EU funds US$ 300 million to develop galip nut (Canarium indicum) in New Britain.
- Happy Birthday, Fort Collins.
- First, pocket pigs. Now, mini-cows. Watch our hits go through the roof.
- The story of the mother who went to Hell to protect her daughter.
- Kiribati to get atoll agriculture development centre. But where will they put it?
Rethinking animal domestication
An article in the NY Times summarizes some interesting recent thinking about the beginning of animal domestication in the Mediterranean. It is based on an article in PNAS by Melinda Zader at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I leaned about it via Dienekes’Â Anthropology Blog, where you’ll find some additional links and some interesting comments.
The conventional way to time animal domestication has been to look for smaller boned animals in the archaelological record. But it seems that if you instead look for the first signs of human management of herds, rather than the morphological signal, you can push the date of domestication back a thousand years, to 11,000 years ago. There were multiple domestications of each livestock species, and different species originated in different areas within the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. Then it seems people moved these livestock, and the associated crops, by sea across and along the Mediterranean. These seafaring colonists established coastal Neolithic enclaves, from which agriculture spread inland. There was also “adoption of domesticates and domestic technologies by indigenous populations and the local domestication of some endemic species.”
It looks like we may be going back to a model of agricultural expansion based on the movement of people, rather than on the diffusion of technologies.