The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) awarded Dr. Diane Ragone, founder and director emerita of NTBG’s Breadfruit Institute 1, the 2024 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. Dr. Ragone gave this presentation at the award ceremony, sharing her four-decade journey exploring, conserving, and promoting breadfruit.
Nibbles: Fiona Hay, Richard Ellis, FAO exhibition, Peasants, Wheat breeding, Svalbard, Søren Ejlersen, Ephraim Bull, Heirloom apples, Caffeine, Collards history
- Dr Fiona Hay, seed scientist, on why we need genebanks, including seed banks.
- Prof. Richard Ellis retires. A genebank legend, as Fiona would probably agree.
- FAO exhibition goes From Seeds to Foods. By way of genebanks, no doubt.
- And peasants, of course. No, it’s not a derogatory word, settle down.
- Can Green Revolution breeding approaches (and genebanks) help peasants deal with climate change?
- Even genebanks need a back-up plan though.
- New Mexico genebank helps out Danish chef.
- The history of the Concord grape and its foxiness. Chefs intrigued.
- The history of Aport and Amasya apples. No foxiness involved, as far as I know. Genebanks? Probably.
- The origin of caffeine. Now do foxiness.
- Where did collards come from anyway? No, not genebanks. Bloody historians, always re-writing history.
Brainfood: Defining domestication, Pig domestication, Archaeological orphan crops, Levant Neolithic causes, Altiplano agricultural origins, Irish cattle, Islamic Green Revolution, Ancient fish DNA, Ancient Chinese rice
- A universally applicable definition for domestication. Domestication is just evolution in anthropogenic environments.
- Early evidence for pig domestication (8,000 cal. BP) in the Lower Yangtze, South China. Evolution in anthropogenic environments can follow different pathways.
- Orphan crops of archaeology-based crop history research. Some crops are also neglected by archaeologists. Maybe because they weren’t domesticated enough?
- Catastrophic fires and soil degradation: possible association with the Neolithic revolution in the southern Levant. Domestication was caused by lightning.
- Altiplano agricultural origins was a process of economic resilience, not hardship: Isotope chemistry, zooarchaeology, and archaeobotany in the Titicaca Basin, 5.5-3.0 ka. Farming was not caused by anything so traumatic as lightning on the Altiplano.
- Changing human-cattle relationships in Ireland: a 6000-year isotopic perspective. Open land management of cattle in the Iron Age led to their central position in Irish culture. Maybe lightning was involved in clearing the land?
- Re-thinking the ‘Green Revolution’ in the Mediterranean world. The impact of the Islamic Green Revolution was down to more than just new crops and irrigation. Bit like the modern Green Revolution then?
- Roman Atlantic garum: DNA confirms sardine use and population continuity in north-western Iberia. You can characterize and compare old fish remains based on the DNA that survived fermentation at the bottom of ancient salting vats.
- Exploration of crop germplasm resources knowledge mining in Chinese ancient books: a route toward sustainable agriculture. You can characterize and compare old rice varieties based on the descriptions that survived in ancient chronicles. Maybe pig varieties too?
Is the avocado toast?
Jeremy’s latest newsletter saves me including an interesting paper on the domestication of avocado in a forthcoming Brainfood.
The often humid climate of the tropics means that ancient plant remains are few and far between, making it difficult to trace the long-term history of crops there. Thanks to a dry rock shelter in western Honduras, which preserved “an unparalleled sequence of radiocarbon-dated avocado remains,” researchers have now rewritten its ancient history. The paper is paywalled; I found out about it because one of the universities involved has just published a popular account, which in turn led me to an earlier popular report from another of the universities.
Two key milestones emerged. First, people were tending wild avocado trees as far back as 11,000 years ago. And by 7500 years ago, they had begun to select for larger fruits with tougher skins. Those ages reveal a bigger surprise; they predate the arrival of maize. The standard view is that as maize spread to new locations, it transformed foragers into farmers. The new results show that people were “fully engaged in tree cultivation upon maize’s arrival”.
The research also has a message for the modern avocado industry, 90% of whose fruits are of the single Hass variety. Because they are multiplied as clonal offsets, those trees are all genetically identical and thus all equally vulnerable to any pest, disease or climate change that affects them. The researchers point out that farmers grew avocados from seedlings for millennia, and that much of that genetic diversity lingers in remaining relict populations. As Amber VanDerwarker, lead researcher on the study, points out:
Developing new varieties through seed selection of modern domesticates and wild relict populations growing throughout Central America may provide more success in adapting trees to these changing landscapes than clonal propagation alone.
Brainfood: Protein, AnGR, Indian chickens, US Mashona cattle, Asiatic wild ass, European Neolithic pigs, Low methane pastures, American dogs, Baker’s yeast, Lager yeast
- Links between protein-source diversity, household behavior, and protein consumption inadequacy in the Indian rural semi-arid tropics. More diversity in protein sources, including livestock, would probably lead to more consumption, especially if linked to more education on its importance.
- Integrating Local and Indigenous Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (LIAnGRFA) into global biodiversity governance. We wont keep livestock diversity for long if we don’t integrate its conservation into existing mechanisms.
- Introduction to chicken genetic resources of India: a comprehensive review. India seems to agree with the above, at least with regards to its chickens, and is doing something about it.
- Out of Africa: genetic characterization and diversity of Mashona cattle in the United States. Something will certainly have to be done about the Mashona in the US if its interesting but limited diversity is to survive.
- Impacts of Climate-Land Dynamics on Global Population and Sub-Populations of a Desert Equid. Ditto for the Asiatic wild ass, although I suppose its contribution to human protein supply is pretty safe.
- Archaeogenomic insights into commensalism and regional variation in pig management in Neolithic northwest Europe. Even Neolithic European farmers managed the diversity of their livestock, pigs in this case.
- Agronomic performance, herbage quality, methane yield and methane emission potential of pasture mixtures. All those diverse livestock might as well be eating the sort of feed that leads to lower methane emissions.
- Ancient dog mitogenomes support the dual dispersal of dogs and agriculture into South America. Domestic dogs were taken into South America along with maize, according to their genetic structure. No word on whether they were used as protein sources.
- Footprints of Human Migration in the Population Structure of Wild Baker’s Yeast. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is something else whose genetic structure was heavily influenced by early farmers, and indeed continues to be by modern farming.
- Revealing the ancient origins of blonde beers: Phylogeography and phylogenetics of cryotolerant fermentative yeast Saccharomyces eubayanus from pre-Hispanic pottery in Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina. Did those early South American farmers ferment their maize, I wonder? They had the yeast for it, which eventually made it to Europe and gave us lager. And no, beer is not a good protein source.