- Make way for Dovyalis hebecarpa, aka the Ceylon gooseberry, your new favourite superfood for the week.
- US$6.5 million to breed better cucurbits. Maybe.
- Rise and fall of agrarian states influenced by climate volatility. Those who do not understand history etc.
- Bioversity urges crop wild relatives to avoid the fate of the dodo.
- Name that grape! An extraordinary online resource for Italian ampelography.
Nibbles: Seeds, Climate models, Stonehenge’s food, Loosely clustered grapes
- Deeper insights into how farmers get their seeds could make seed aid more effective shock, with added video goodness.
- Big data for smallholder farmers; CIAT’s boss writes the history.
- Meat for the masses and dairy for the deities. What the builders of Stonehenge ate, and where.
- If you thought grapolo spargolo was a pseudonym of the Prosecco grape variety Glera, you’re in good company. But wrong. “[M]any English-language bloggers have simply copied and pasted the erroneous information from the Wiki entry”. For shame!
Brainfood: Forage diversity, Chinese cherry, Meta-diversity, Sunflower ecogeography, Lima bean domestication, Dog breeding, Goat ethnogenetics, Pigs vs chickens
- Complementary effects of species and genetic diversity on productivity and stability of sown grasslands. Species diversity good for total production, genetic diversity good for regular production throughout the year, regardless of water. And more, and more.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Patterns in Chinese Cherry (Prunus pseudocerasus Lindl) Landraces. Perhaps 2 domestication sites.
- Inter-individual variation promotes ecological success of populations and species: evidence from experimental and comparative studies. More diverse populations are less vulnerable to environmental changes, more stable in population size, less extinction prone, have better establishment success and larger ranges, especially under stress.
- Ecogeography and utility to plant breeding of the crop wild relatives of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). Many close relatives of the crop in extreme environments.
- Domestication of small-seeded lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.) landraces in Mesoamerica: evidence from microsatellite markers. Two domestications events. Maybe.
- Trends in genetic diversity for all Kennel Club registered pedigree dog breeds. Popular sires have made for a lot of inbreeding, but this has been getting better of late.
- The N’Dama dilemma: ethnogenetics and small ruminant breed dynamics in the tsetse zone, The Gambia. Saving the name is not enough.
- The Pig and the Chicken in the Middle East: Modeling Human Subsistence Behavior in the Archaeological Record Using Historical and Animal Husbandry Data. Chickens replaced pigs in the first millennium Middle East because they were smaller and more efficient. Oh, and eggs.
Wheat that goes around, comes around
There’s lots of fascinating material in Robert Spengler’s new review paper on Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age. ((Spengler, R. (2015). Agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age Journal of World Prehistory, 28 (3), 215-253 DOI: 10.1007/s10963-015-9087-3)) This map of the region comes from an earlier paper of his, but sets the scene nicely.
The thesis of the latest paper is that the conventional model of mixed agropastoralism in Central Asia gradually becoming typical nomadic pastoralism needs to be rethought. In fact, Spengler says, after looking in detail at the archaeological evidence, the mixed pastoral economies of the Bronze Age, with their distinctive package of crops derived from both further east and west in place by 2500 BC, actually intensified into the Iron Age. The result was “irrigated agriculture, sedentary villages, and a drastically altered anthropogenic landscape.”
I may come back to that in a later post, but here I want to focus on what I learned about wheat. I knew that the Green Revolution was based in large part on the use of Rht genes from a Japanese wheat called Norin 10. These genes cause dwarfing, and allow the wheat plant to divert energy into the grain rather than the straw. Yields shot up in places like India, and the Borlaug legend was born.
What I didn’t know is that there was so-called “Indian dwarf wheat” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India before the Green Revolution, characterized by
…dense strong culms and erect blades, a condensed spike which expresses with short awns, glumes, and a hemispherical grain. In addition, it has increased tillering and a reduced rate of lodging…
All of the wheat found in Bronze Age Central Asia seems to have been of this type too, as far as one can tell by comparing archaeobotanical remains with herbarium and genebank material. And similar material turns up in sites in Japan and Korea a millennium and more later. Spengler is circumspect, asking for genetic studies, but it is certainly an intriguing possibility that
…pre-Harappan farmers in India bred a phenotype that would later alter agriculture globally.
Brainfood: Olive oil composition, Storing rice, Fair Trade, Red List, Farmer seed systems, Dipterocarp genetic structure, Italian bread wheat, Nepal crop diversity, Rice origins
- In situ evaluation of the fruit and oil characteristics of the main Lebanese olive germplasm. Some may have levels of ∆-7-stigmastenol which are on the high side. This is a chemical used in fraud detection, apparently.
- Viability monitoring intervals for genebank samples of Oryza sativa. Wait for fail (<85% germination) in the active collection before testing the corresponding seedlot in the base collection.
- Fair Trade and Free Entry: Can a Disequilibrium Market Serve as a Development Tool? Busted.
- Green Plants in the Red: A Baseline Global Assessment for the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants. 20% of species assessed are threatened with extinction, mainly from tropical rain forest, mainly as a result of conversion to agriculture and harvesting of natural resources.
- Farmer seed networks make a limited contribution to agriculture? Four common misconceptions. They’re not inefficient, they’re not closed and conservative, and they’re not doomed. But they could work better and in a more egalitarian way.
- Understanding local patterns of genetic diversity in dipterocarps using a multi-site, multi-species approach: Implications for forest management and restoration. In most of these species, genetically similar individuals cluster together, resulting in inbreeding, especially after fragmentation due to logging. But you can do something about that through management.
- Morpho-physiolological and qualitative traits of a bread wheat collection spanning a century of breeding in Italy. The ideotype has changed significantly in Italy over the past 100 years.
- Assessing links between crop diversity and food self-sufficiency in three agroecological regions of Nepal. Whether greater crop diversity translates into more stable livelihoods depends on access to markets.
- A Population Genomics Insight into the Mediterranean Origins of Wine Yeast Domestication. Closest wild population to wine yeast comes from Mediterranean oak, and diverged at about the right time.
- Modelling the Geographical Origin of Rice Cultivation in Asia Using the Rice Archaeological Database. Two centres of origin, in Middle Yangtze and Lower Yangtze valleys.