I’ve been reading Mathilda37’s interesting blog about human evolution for a while now. What makes her particularly worth following from our eeyrie here at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog is that she frequently writes about domesticates too. Case in point: she’s just done a very useful roundup of DNA studies of cattle. Roundup. Cattle. Geddit?
Nibbles: Agave, Fruits, Rotation, Potato, Dogs, Banana, Egypt, Sagittaria latifolia, Cooking
- Tequila!
- Fruitipedia.
- Rotation rediscovered.
- Japan potatoes diversify.
- The genetics of dog behaviour.
- Freakonomist pleads for information. Is the banana doomed, or what?
- Ancient Egyptians stored grain and wine.
- 3,600 year old wapato tubers found in Canada. Wawhat?
- Sarko wants UNESCO to protect French cuisine. Yeah because on its own it just doesn’t have a chance.
Nibbles: Bananas, Wheat, Cameroon, Bees, Eden, Millennium Villages, Organic, Yam, Ag origins, Apricots
- Compare and contrast the banana and the Big Mac. Dan Koeppel takes it to the masses.
- Lamenting the loss of “amber waves of grain”. Ingrate.
- Cameroon’s agriculture vulnerable to climate change. I’ll alert the media.
- Look what I got you for National Pollinator Week next week; a World Checklist of Bees. Neat-o.
- Celebrate food and farmers in Eden.
- “The core of the strategy is a short-term provision of improved seeds suited to the local environment and fertilizers like Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP) and urea accompanied by advice on how to use them.” Sounds familiar…
- Meanwhile, in non-Millennium Villages: “While his maize cobs were smaller than others, the seed was of a much higher quality; the fibre of his cotton was also much longer.”
- Japanese yam fields in peril. Yams as in Dioscorea or sweet potato or what? So annoying.
- Neolithic myths?
- California apricot grower explores Central Asia, comes up trumps. Jeremy comments: CandyCots? I think I want to be sick.
Nibbles: Migration, Micronutrients, Taste, Kava, News, Data, Ozone, Chillis
- Rats to New Zealand.
- 300 grand grant to develop an iron bullet.
- Yummie, that tomato tastes very umami!
- “When they call their toxic products ‘kava’, they are misusing the word.”
- Subscribe to the Semilla Besada newsletter.
- Gates Foundation helps FAO improve African agricultural statistics. About time someone did.
- How to conserve rare plants.
- As if climate change is not bad enough, there’s also ozone to worry about. Thankfully, Michigan is on it.
- Boffin uses nanotubes to measure chilli hotness. Useful because some don’t like it hot.
Reindeer domestication
From our occasional contributor Michael Kubisch.
Reindeer have been domesticated by denizens of the Northern hemisphere for some time – but exactly for how long and whether domestication occurred at different sites or only once has been the matter of some debate. Estimates of how long ago domestication might have happened have ranged from as long as 20,000 years ago to as little as 3000. Part of the problems stems from the lack of archaeological records that could pinpoint a more exact time frame. The evidence for the shorter period relies mostly on ethnographic observation, such as the development of certain implements (for example saddles) that early reindeer herders developed apparently after contact with other people of the central Asian steppes.
But did domestication happen more than once? A recent paper by a group of researchers from Oslo sheds some light on this question. After analysis of a number of DNA markers they conclude that the Sami people of Northern Scandinavia domesticated reindeer independently from indigenous people in what is now Russia. Moreover the evidence points to the existence of three distinct gene pools suggesting that domestication even within Russia may have occurred more than once.
And there is another interesting observation: comparisons with gene markers from wild reindeer suggests that introgression of “wild” genes into domestic reindeer appears to have happened quite frequently through the ages, but that only some of the wild populations have made genetic contributions suggesting perhaps different propensities for domestication among animals of various wild herds.
Unfortunately there is increasing concern about the future of reindeer agriculture. The Sami herders, who live in Scandinavia, Finland and parts of Russia, are beginning to feel the effects of global climate changes. The rapid warming trend that seems to occur in the Northern hemisphere interferes not only with foraging but also with the ability to move animals across what used to be solid ice. And many Sami now fear not only the loss of their livelihood, but also the disappearance of a substantial part of the culture, which has always been intricately linked to reindeer. Â