- New evidence of plant food processing in Italy before 40ka. Did modern humans outcompete Neanderthals in Italy by grinding up and eating wild cereals? No, probably not, but still.
- Early Dalmatian farmers specialized in sheep husbandry. Did early Dalmatian farmers outcompete local hunter gatherers by eating sheep? No, probably not, but still.
- Northwest African Neolithic initiated by migrants from Iberia and Levant. Iberians brought farming to the Maghreb, where local hunter-gatherers were both outcompeted and enticed to change their lifestyles, and the whole thing happened again later when pastoralism arrived from the Levant.
- Genetic continuity, isolation, and gene flow in Stone Age Central and Eastern Europe. This outcompeting thing happened to different extents in different parts of Europe.
- Why did foraging, horticulture and pastoralism persist after the Neolithic transition? The oasis theory of agricultural intensification. Lower rainfall and lower biodiversity allowed early intensive agriculture around the world to outcompete other lifestyles.
- New research on crop diversity of the early farmers in southeastern Europe (ca. 6400-5700 BCE). Some crops were outcompeted by others as agriculture spread into Europe.
- The early adoption of East Asian crops in West Asia: rice and broomcorn millet in northern Iran. Starting in East Asia, broomcorn millet reached the Caspian Sea’s southern coast by 2050 BC by infiltrating and rice by 120 BC by leapfrogging. No word on what they outcompeted.
- Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken’s introduction to Europe and north-west Africa. It took a long time for chickens to outcompete other sources of food. For a long time they were just exotic pets.
- Pre-Columbian legacy and modern land use in the Bolivian Amazon. Modern farming practices are taking advantage of ancient farming practices in the Llanos de Moxos. Unclear who is outcompeting whom.
Nibbles: Milpa revival, Cretan olive, Lost apples, Moche meals, African agroecology, Global Tree Knowledge Platform, Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity
- Marketing the milpa.
- Marketing a traditional Cretan olive variety.
- Finding lost apples in New England. Now to market them.
- Taking new passion fruit varieties to market in Australia.
- Deconstructing Moche history, society and culture through compost and struggle meals. No sign of markets.
- Reviewing the state of agroecology in Africa. Does “economic diversification” count as marketing?
- The Global Tree Knowledge Platform must have stuff on marketing somewhere.
- The books series ISSUES IN AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY, now free to download, has lots on marketing.
Nibbles: Business, CGIAR & FARA, Agrobiodiversity Index, Beans, Artisanal sake, Nabhan on mezcals, Kernza anniversary, Fish diversity, Amazon trees, Dark extinctions
- Gardening pioneer says “Be as diverse as possible!“
- Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, says businesses should be as biodiverse as possible.
- CGIAR and FARA launch an initiative to transform agriculture in Africa but the role of biodiversity is unclear.
- Maybe they should embrace the Agrobiodiversity Index, now that it has won a big prize.
- Speaking of agricultural biodiversity and prizes, here’s a podcast on the EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award winning project “Investigating the Origin of the Common Bean in the New World.”
- A trio of pieces on agrobiodiverse products: sake, mezcal, Kernza.
- Don’t forget fish need to be as diverse as possible too.
- Ok, not agriculture-related, but this visual essay on finding the tallest tree in the Amazon is really cool.
- Not so cool: some species you can only see in natural history collections. The world is not as diverse as possible.
Brainfood: Domestication treble, Introgression treble, Biodiversity mapping double, Oak conservation, Niche modelling double
- Plant domestication: setting biological clocks. Domestication changed plants’ timekeeping and made them less resilient, but there is variation among the biological clocks of different organs that could tapped in breeding.
- Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies. There have been 7 main paths to plant domestication, or commonalities in the ways that plants were domesticated by people in different parts of the world in the past: ecosystem engineering, ruderal, tuber, grain, segetal, fibre, fruit tree.
- Plants cultivated for ecosystem restoration can evolve toward a domestication syndrome. Ok, maybe 8.
- Diamonds in the Not-So-Rough: Wild Relative Diversity Hidden in Crop Genomes. The cool alleles you spotted in wild relatives may already be in cultivated genomes, and that can save breeders some time and effort.
- Finding needles in a haystack: identification of inter-specific introgressions in wheat genebank collections using low-coverage sequencing data. Ah, here they are.
- Interspecific common bean population derived from Phaseolus acutifolius using a bridging genotype demonstrate useful adaptation to heat tolerance. I guess this is an example of the time that could be saved.
- Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation. A third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high biodiversity conservation priority, with cattle, maize, rice, and soybean posing the greatest threat and sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower the lowest. No word on how many crop wild relatives are threatened, but there’s a cool online mapping tool that could I suppose be used to mash things up.
- Assessing habitat diversity and potential areas of similarity across protected areas globally. At a pinch, this could be used to identify backups for any threatened sites of high biodiversity conservation priority.
- Ex situ conservation of two rare oak species using microsatellite and SNP markers. Watch out for the creeping domestication syndrome though, if these ever get used for restoration :)
- TreeGOER: a database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Even more than all the CWRs we did. But no, I don’t know if those oaks are included…
- Ecological Niche Models using MaxEnt in Google Earth Engine: Evaluation, guidelines and recommendations. …but if not you can always work their ranges out for yourself.
Nibbles: Alt-proteins, NPGS, Serviceberry, Fungal diseases, Old Irish farm
- The benefits of alt-proteins spelled out in a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. I bet they’ll need alt-genebanks.
- The US national genebank system expertly deconstructed in a page.
- Bozakmin, the best of the berries, used to contrast late stage capitalism with Indigenous gift economies. Well worth the long read.
- Comment in Nature about how we are not taking fungal diseases of crops sufficiently seriously.
- There’s a place in Ireland with a 6000 year history of farming. Well maybe that’s rounded up a bit.