Why was the Somali wild ass domesticated and not, say, the zebra? It’s a cantankerous animal at best. Washington University archaeologist Fiona Marshall is travelling the world looking at bones and wild populations, but she is also studying the behaviour of the St Louis Zoo’s five wild asses with Zoo researcher Cheryl Asa to seek “clues as to how they were turned into donkeys,” according to this article.
What would early farmers do?
AlphaGalileo, the self-styled “world’s leading resource for European research news” has a piece on an experiment to reconstruct early Neolithic living conditions in Austria. But what varieties are they going to grow?