- Bronx Seedless finally hits the shops.
- The Irish Iron Age Diet.
- Choosing the right legume. But where’s the tool?
- The answer to better coffee is Ethiopia.
- Pacific Global Breadfruit Summit honours Diane Ragone. In other news, there’s a breadfruit summit.
Nibbles: CATIE genebank, Wine microbiome, Olive history, CGIAR breeding, Yerba mate, Breadfruit, Ambling horses
- It’s been a while since we linked to CATIE’s genebank.
- Boffins take next step in spoiling wine for us all.
- The olive is another thing the Romans have done for us.
- The international germplasm collections are at the root of the CGIAR’s breeding programs.
- Marketing mate.
- Let them eat breadfruit.
- The amble is down to a single medieval mutation.
Nibbles: Post-Roman Britain, World grapes, Ghana food security, Sheep stomachs, Alpaca trouble, CIMMYT genebank
- Anglo-Saxons may not have dropped spelt as quickly as we thought.
- The history of South Africa’s Kristaldruif grape. And where to find it.
- It was colonization that messed up Ghana’s food security. Boris take note.
- The brotherhood of manouls. They can keep it.
- Alpaca farmers out in the cold.
- CIMMYT annual report highlights the genebank.
Ancient agricultural DNA everywhere
Heady days for ancient DNA researchers. There have been two major papers in the past month looking at the DNA of Neolithic farmers. Back in June, a huge research consortium published “The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers” as a preprint in bioRxiv, with subsequent write-up in Nature. And now a different huge consortium comes out with “Early Neolithic genomes from the eastern Fertile Crescent,” in Science. That also got widely picked up.
Don’t ask me why two separate research groups need to be working on basically the same problem, in basically the same way. I suppose they’re using somewhat different methods on different material. I really couldn’t tell you whether it would have been better to pool the material, or standardize the methods, or indeed both. Maybe someone out there will tell us. In any case, it’s reassuring, I suppose, that the two studies came to broadly similar conclusions, namely that there were genetic differences among early farmers, and that genetically distinct people from different parts of the Fertile Crescent migrated north into Europe and eastwards further into Asia. Which in turn suggests to some that the origins of agriculture may be described as “federal”:
Different and genetically distinct populations were all engaged in this same general project, albeit exchanging ideas with each or other or sometimes coming up with the same idea independently.
Meanwhile, sequencing of DNA from a 6000-year-old barley from the Dead Sea shows close similarity with varieties still grown in the southern Levant and Egypt. Intriguing to speculate whether a similar study of material from the Zagros Mountains would show a parallel pattern to the human DNA. But will it need a different group of researchers to do it.
Nibbles: African fruits, Old apple, Ancient barley, GRAIN study, Desertification, Biodiversity loss
- ICRAF helps us understand little-understood African fruit trees.
- The apple is pretty well understood, but this one important, 200-year-old tree is dying. Tissue culture to the rescue.
- I see your 200-year-old-tree and I raise you 6000-year-old barley.
- GRAIN takes aim at FTAs.
- Desertification may not be a thing.
- Biodiversity loss is, though, right?