Category: Archaeology

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Brainfood: Human diversity, Wild rye, Caribbean cassava, Three Sisters, Old beer, Old apples, Feral crops, Crop resynthesis

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The dawn of farming revisited

Yeah, ok, here’s that cool map about the Fertile Crescent that I alluded to in a recent Nibble.

But do read the blog posts by Chad Mulligan the thesis of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything with regards to the origins of farming Part 1 and Part 2.

In chapters six and seven of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow present a very different account of the origins of agriculture than that found most conventional history books. This account, they say, contradicts many of the assumptions made by the authors of Big History, who tend to portray farming as ineluctably leading to inequality, hierarchy, private property, violence, and centralized states.

Instead, they argue that early farming societies were no more hierarchical than their predecessors, and may have even been less violent more egalitarian than their hunter-gatherer neighbors. The imply that cultivation may have even initially began as a strategy expressly designed to avoid succumbing to the values of hierarchy and violence. They are especially critical of Yuval Noah Harari’s Russian reversal-style metaphor of “wheat domesticating us.” This, they say, is yet another “Garden of Eden-type narrative,” except with “wheat taking the place of the snake.”

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Nibbles: Brazil agroforestry, US sweet potatoes, Egypt sweet potatoes, Regenerative Carlsberg, Plant Pandemic Studies, The Dawn of Everything, Allianz biodiversity report

  1. Saleseforce is funding work by CIFOR-ICRAF to help diversify agriculture in the Brazilian state of Pará by growing more nutritious fruit trees in agroforestry systems.
  2. USDA researchers are breeding sweet potatoes that are better able to deal with weeds. No word on how they do in agroforestry systems.
  3. I wonder if those weed-resistant sweet potatoes would find a market in Egypt.
  4. Beer “giant” Carlsberg says it’s going all-in on regenerative barley growing practices. Looking forward to seeing hops agroforestry systems.
  5. The British Society for Plant Pathology has a series of really engaging Plant Pandemic Studies, including for some crops that do well in agroforestry systems.
  6. The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is getting a lot of attention, including for its thesis that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent as somewhat ad hoc, experimental, diverging, complementary and interacting lowland and highland agroforestry systems, and did not always lead to inequality and hierarchy. With a nice map.
  7. And finally, here’s a report from Allianz on why the financial sector should care about biodiversity-friendly agricultural systems (pace David Wood), like maybe, but not only, agroforestry.
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Brainfood: Why measure genetic diversity?

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Nibbles: Green seeds, Yam bean, Aussie wild tomato, Einkorn trial, US sorghum, Ethiopian forages tricot, Cuisine diversity, Apple catalogue, Hittite crash, Black Death

  1. Let’s say we wanted to transition to a more local and low-input production system in Europe. What seeds would we need and where would we get them from? The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament have some ideas.
  2. IITA is pushing the yam bean in Nigeria. Europe next?
  3. More on that new Australian wild tomato from a couple of years back. With audio goodness.
  4. The largest ever einkorn variety comparison trial makes the German news. Well, makes a press release anyway. Yam bean next?
  5. Another continent, another ancient grain: sorghum in the US. Yam bean next?
  6. The Ethiopia Grass project aims to improve livestock production, food crop yields AND soil quality. The trifecta!
  7. Nice infographics displaying dodgy data on the most common ingredients in different cuisines. Yam bean and einkorn nowhere to be seen.
  8. Cool community-created online catalogue of British apples. Looking forward to the yam bean one.
  9. It was drought that did for the Hittites, not lack of yam beans. Sea Peoples unavailable for comment.
  10. It was Yersinia pestis from Issyk-Kul that nearly did for Europe in the Middle Ages. Yes, you can study the genetic diversity of ancient deadly bugs and well as that of crops like yam bean and einkorn.