Category: Domestication

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Documenting the farming transition around the world

Two recent papers shed light on that grey area where hunter-gatherers become farmers. From northern China, archaeological evidence is showing that 8,000 years ago it was highly mobile foraging bands interested in feeding not only themselves but also, interestingly, their hunting dogs, who in effect invented millet — that’s broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica) — cultivation. This was later taken up and intensified by what are known as the Late Banpo Phase millet agriculturalists.

A thousand years previously, and half a world away, archaeological, paleoecological, linguistic and genetic data from the SW United States seems to suggest that “maize moved northward from central Mexico to [the] Southwest by being passed from one hunter-gatherer band to the next, who incorporated the crop into their subsistence economies and eventually became farmers themselves.” Not, that is, as a result of the movement of Mexican agriculturalists, which was the alternative scenario. Nothing to do with feeding their livestock in this case, though. Turkeys seem to have been domesticated much later.

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Fair deal for rooibos

Before fair trade, small-scale farmers like Hendrik lived close to the breadline as prices for rooibos were squeezed by the market. But fair trade has tripled the farmers’ income. Plus, with the extra money they now get for the tea, Hendrik and his friends can invest in their future, buying their own farming equipment and their own tea court where the raw rooibos leaves are chopped and dried.

“Hendrik” is Hendrik Hesselman, from the Cedarberg region of South Africa. He’s one of 5,000 farmers from Cedarberg who produce the world’s supply of rooibos (or redbush) tea.

Mr Hesselman is a founding member of the 50-plus strong Heiveld Cooperative, which was established in 2003 — with backing from UKaid from the Department for International Development — “to get their tea recognised as Fairtrade, and to get a fair price for it.”

There are also photos, and a video on the community’s attempts to adapt to climate change. One of the things they’re doing is evaluating different “wild types” of rooibos for tolerance of drought conditions. I can’t find any reference to ex situ conservation activities, alas.

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Nibbles: Rhubarb and the EU, Mexican biodiversity Qat in Yemen, Organic cubed

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How did farming start?

No answers: we just don’t know. But Bruce Smith, whose book on The Emergence of Agriculture remains one of the best, recently told an audience at Harvard University that although most people see domestication as “a before-and-after kind of event, with hunter-gatherers before and farmers afterward. The reality … was likely far more complex.”

Hard to argue with that, especially in light of increasing evidence that people were both altering the environment to favour wild food sources and cultivating plants without domesticating them. Smith talked a bit about which plants were domesticated — “early-succession species that did well in disturbed environments that humans could create for them” — but not, at least according to the reports, about whether there’s any scope for additional domestications. We’ve asked before: are there any species that people should be cultivating, and possibly domesticating, now that they have so far ignored? My own contenders would be perennial grains. The plants are there; they just need a few thousands year’s work.

Smith’s lecture was part of a series called Food for Thought. 1 We missed one by my old mucker Richard Wrangham, of How Cooking Made Us Human, but tomorrow, 23 February, Samuel Myers will “discuss troubling trends, including climate change and increased threats from pests and pathogens that may constrain the world’s resources, requiring new approaches to sustainable agriculture.” I wonder whether agricultural biodiversity will feature. Someone go, and tell us.