- One crazy French guy, 1134 tomato varieties.
- The World Coffee Research International Multi Location Variety Trial really gets off the grounds. See what I did there?
- The Basques descend from Neolithic farmers.
- Ancient Sri Lankan irrigation systems. Which Bangladesh doesn’t need.
- National Heirloom Expo is on.
- Did we link to this three-trillion-tree story yet? I don’t think so. How many are edible fruit trees, I wonder?
- …or indeed agroforestry and fertilizer trees. Always worth listening to Jules Pretty.
- So much for the Paleolithic Diet.
- In agricultural innovation, “optimal IPR use depends on the technology itself as well as on market conditions.”
- Multinational food companies found to be short-sighted shock.
- The global impacts of UK food consumption.
- The Wheat Initiative has an agenda.
- Can you recognize these crops? ‘Course you can.
- Eggplant pre-breeding project involving wild relatives makes mainstream media. Faith in humanity restored. Until you see what else is on that page.
- Drought hits Ethiopia. Let them eat sweet potatoes?
Nibbles: Plant names, Tomato trifecta, Amaranth, Corn wars, Wild lettuce, Dying, Indian ag, Chocographic, Root symbionts, Rehabilitation, Mesquite, Extreme weather, Saviour plants, Pawpaw, Japanese rice, Coffee museum, Caribbean early ag, Amazonian livelihoods, Vislak on corn
- In praise of common names. Meh. You won’t see a Latin name in this whole Nibbles. See how you like it.
- Building a tomato. In Spanish.
- Tracking a tomato.
- The dark side of tomatoes.
- Amaranth to rescue Mexicans from obesity.
- Seeds of contention.
- Finding the lost Least Lettuce.
- Indigo goes back to the future.
- What if the monsoon fails? MS Swaminathan has some answers.
- Nice chocolate infographic from FAO.
- A diverse microbial community in and around roots helps plants thrive. The Science article is behind a paywall, but there’s a helpful infographic on Twitter.
- The US has a National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration. Vision? The right seed in the right place at the right time. Wish I’d thought of that.
- When otherwise useful trees attack. Ah, the irony of this coming right after the previous one.
- UK’s Global Food Security programme says extreme weather events are increasing and we must adapt agriculture. Good to know.
- And today’s Five Plants That Will Save the World are…
- Maybe add pawpaw to that?
- Japanese rice farmers: change gonna come.
- Nice coffee museum in Brazil.
- Early agriculture in the Caribbean: Cuba and Trinidad.
- The babaçu breakers of Maranhão are under threat. What’s babaçu? Yeah, well, look it up.
- “Seed banking began about 30 years ago as an improvement to individual farmers storing and using their own seeds.” Riiiiight.
- That Vilsak is a card.
Nibbles: Kinky crops, Hot pepper, Cary Fowler, Gin history, Open data, Quaker food, QPM in Ethiopia, Botany app, Old seeds, New tomato
- Why aren’t there more crops among the orchids?
- This pepper is not so much a crop as a weapon of mass destruction.
- Now here’s a crop. New tomato has taste, storability, looks. But I think it’s dating.
- Maize with cool amino acids reaches Ethiopia. Must have walked there.
- Really old squash seeds.
- Cary Fowler on the Weather Channel. You heard me.
- Quakers have an opinion on the right to food and climate change. Well, why shouldn’t they? They also have a UN office, but that’s another story. No word on whether they made the Weather Channel.
- Ok, so apparently the answer is data. Says a data company. And open data at that. Quakers nonplussed.
- Botanizing in N or S America? There’s an app for that.
- The rise and rise of gin. And I certainly need one.
Nibbles: Native American foods, Responsible soy maps, Ocean blue, Social academics, Kenyan vendors, Coffee pix, Local food takedown, Ancient horses, Kava bar, Plantae, Root fungi
- Traditional foods fight Native American obesity.
- Round Table on Responsible Soy makes some nice maps.
- The Decade for African Seas and Oceans is off to a blue start.
- Face it, academics, social media are good for you.
- You think Pres. Obama checked out some Nairobi street food?
- Pics of coffee value chain. Wow, that makes it sound really boring.
- Calling bullshit on farm to fork.
- A day in the life of an archeologist of Iron Age horses.
- Kava reaches NYC hipsters.
- Plantae is coming!
- Rice plants colonized by mychorriza express different genes and have more lateral roots.
Early agriculture in the Old and New Worlds
Last week saw the publication of a couple of papers about early agriculture in two very different regions which will probably have people talking for quite a while. From Snir et al. ((Snir A, Nadel D, Groman-Yaroslavski I, Melamed Y, Sternberg M, Bar-Yosef O, et al. (2015) The Origin of Cultivation and Proto-Weeds, Long Before Neolithic Farming. PLoS ONE 10(7): e0131422. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131422)) came a study of pre-Neolithic cultivation in the Near East. And from the other side of the world, there was the latest in the controversy over the extent of Amazonian agriculture from Clement et al. ((Clement CR, Denevan WM, Heckenberger MJ, Junqueira AB, Neves EG, Teixeira WG, Woods WI. 2015 The domestication of Amazonia before European conquest. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20150813. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0813)).
Yes, I did say pre-Neolithic. The key finding of the archaeological work described by the first paper is that 23,000 years ago, or over 11 millennia before the putative start of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers along the Sea of Galilee in what is now Israel maintained little — and, crucially, weedy — fields of cereals. The archaeobotanists found remains of both the weeds and the cereals at a site called Ohalo II, as well as of sickles, and the cereals were not entirely “wild”, as the key domestication indicator of a non-brittle rachis was much more common than it should have been. To see what this means, have a look at this diagram from a fairly recent paper on agricultural origins in the region. ((Brown, Terence A., Jones, Martin K., Powell, Wayne and Allaby, Robin G.. (2008) The complex origins of domesticated crops in the Fertile Crescent. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol.24 (No.2). pp. 103-109. ISSN 0169-5347))
Those “first phenotypic indications of domestication”, dated at 12,500 years ago, need to be pushed quite a bit leftwards on that timeline now, off the edge in fact. A non-shattering rachis, it seems, was quite a quick trick for wild grasses to learn. But the process by which they acquired all the other traits that made them “domesticated” was very protracted and stop-start.
Zoom over to Amazonia, and the transition to farming took place much later, probably around 4,000 years ago, according to the other paper published last week. But it was just as significant as in the much better-known “cradle of agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent, with perhaps 80 species showing evidence of some domestication. The difference, of course, is that Amazonian agriculture was based on trees, rather than annual grasses and legumes.
According to the authors, parts of the Amazon basin, in particular those now showing evidence of earthworks and dark, anthropogenic soils, were just as much managed landscapes by the time of European contact as the places those Europeans came from. But compare our collections of crop diversity from the Amazon basin (courtesy of Genesys, which admittedly does not yet include Brazilian genebanks)…
with what we have from the Near East…
If we want to know more about how the domestication process and transition to agriculture differed in the Amazon and the Fertile Crescent, there’s a whole lot of exploration still to do.