- India finally arrives, gets french fries.
- Sophisticated urbanites tap maples.
- Raise a rare heirloom breed. Then cook it.
- “Some might be hoping he will predict a return to the glory days of the “truly unique” strain of Petitcodiac salmon, which now likely exists only in a gene bank at the Mactaquac Fish Hatchery at this point.”
- Boffins identify world’s first cocktail.
- How people turned from nut collectors into rice farmers in China.
- Hungarians sacrificed dogs.
Agrobiodiversity stays in Vegas
From Jacob van Etten, our Man on the Strip.
The Association of American Geographers held its annual meeting this week in Las Vegas, of all places. I went there to participate in a series of sessions of agrobiodiversity. Last year these sessions had been very successful, according to others, and this year there were three of them. The mandarins of US social research on agrobiodiversity were there, as well as a crew of Young Turks with interesting new studies.
The sessions were kicked off with two talks about the importance of agricultural geography (Kimberlee Chambers) and the contributions that the discipline and related ones have made to understanding agrobiodiversity (Karl Zimmerer). Laura Lewis explained that crops don’t produce systematically more outside their cradle area. There is a theory that says that crops can escape from co-evolved enemies and diseases when brought to other environments. Laura worked out the statistics. Well, it’s not so simple: some crops produce more, some produce less.
In a second session, the good old CGIAR was very well represented. Yours truly explained ongoing work on improving the geographical aspects of genebank databasing and identifying geographical gaps in collections. I also talked about exciting new modeling techniques that can be used for crop genetic diversity work. I got very a positive response from the audience. Keyu Bai explained how Bioversity uses GIS to target genetic resource management interventions in Asia to specific communities to achieve impact.
Matthew Hufford from Davis showed his findings from the field on teosinte in Mexico, a wild relative of maize. He had cool maps on the genetic structure of teosinte and explained why barriers to gene flow occurred. He then addressed one possible gap in genebank collections: the Road Bias. He explained, however, that with a few samples near the road he captured almost all the diversity present. So the “asphalt eater strategy” to germplasm collection may not be so bad after all. Matthew also cited Garrison Wilkes’ call for in situ conservation initiatives for teosinte. Wilkes expects that teosinte will go extinct fairly soon. Matthew pointed out the difficulties to conserve teosinte in the changing landscapes of Mexico. One reason is that teosinte is a noxious weed. He talked with a farmer, however, who thought that teosinte introgression into maize made it mas fuerte — stronger. Perhaps in situ conservation should be done by massively introgressing teosinte into maize, one participant candidly suggested.
Leah Samberg’s talk in the third session had beautiful photographs of Ethiopian landscapes. She pointed out how farmers in one part of Ethiopia get a lot of their barley seeds from different markets, yet mostly from people from the same area and not from the long-distance traders. Studying the circulation of seeds in markets should give exciting new insights in the geography of plant genetic resources. Kraig Kraft used word clouds to communicate some insights in pepper production and diversity in Mexico. For some reason, dried peppers tend to be traditional, but fresh peppers are all hybrids in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Kraig is going to find out why for us. Steve Brush presented the work of one of his students on tortillas in Mexico. One salient aspect is the amount of wood used to make them and the health problems the smoke produced by wood burning causes.
In another session on the Green Revolution, someone said that agricultural geography has suddenly become “hip and coolâ€. It has always been, of course.
Nibbles: Millet origins, Maize origins, Cowpea, Edible weeds, Watermelons
- Trace chemicals in Chinese dog bones from 7-8K years ago suggest a diet high in millet, and therefore its cultivation.
- Maize origins pushed back and down.
- A new cowpea system, including faster varieties, being tried out in Niger.
- It’s spring, and Italians’ thoughts starting to turn to eating weeds.
- “…his 3 wives and 20 children depend on the water melon business as means of livelihood.”
A temple to a lost way of life
Did people start farming because of religion? That’s the claim being made by Klaus Schmidt, the excavator of the beautiful, 12,000-year-old, T-shaped megaliths of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. He calls the site “a temple in Eden” and suggests that the hunter-gatherers that congregated to build it in order to venerate the dead with shamanistic rituals then
…found that they couldn’t feed so many people with regular hunting and gathering. So I think they began cultivating the wild grasses on the hills. Religion motivated people to take up farming.
There was a popular, somewhat sensationalist account of the excavations in the Daily Mail a few days ago. And somewhat more measured pieces in the Smithsonian Magazine and Archaeology last year. But the gist is the same:
Gobekli Tepe is, indeed, a ‘temple in Eden’, built by our leisured and fortunate ancestors — people who had time to cultivate art, architecture and complex ritual, before the traumas of agriculture ruined their lifestyle, and devastated their paradise.
There would certainly have been lots of wild relatives around:
The world’s first farmyard pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, just 60 miles away. Sheep, cattle and goats were also first domesticated in eastern Turkey. Worldwide wheat species descend from einkorn wheat – first cultivated on the hills near Gobekli. Other domestic cereals — such as rye and oats — also started here.
The idea of farming originating to feed the otherwise nomadic people building a temple to the dead may be a little far-fetched, but I suppose weirder hypotheses have been put forward for the origin of agriculture. In any case, it seems to me the biggest mystery is why people buried the whole shebang under tons of soil 8,000 years ago.
When and where was rice domesticated?
A paper by Dorian Fuller and his colleagues in this week’s Science sets out three kinds of evidence that help to pinpoint the time and place of rice domestication in eastern China. ((Fuller, D., Qin, L., Zheng, Y., Zhao, Z., Chen, X., Hosoya, L., & Sun, G. (2009). The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice: Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze Science, 323 (5921), 1607-1610 DOI: 10.1126/science.1166605)) The site is Tianluoshan, just north of the current town of Hemudu on Hangzhou Bay. The water table is very high, which has preserved botanical remains and charred remains, as well as artefacts. Among those remains are more than 35,000 fragments that show how the foodways of the people changed.
In the oldest segment, reliably dated to 4900 years BCE, acorns and water chestnuts (Trapa spp) predominate, with a few other gathered species, notably foxnuts (Euryale ferox). ((A new one on me, related to water lilies. Anyone outside Asia growing it?)). Rice is about 8% of the remains.
Three hundred years later, rice has increased to 24% of the remains, with an equally large increase in the remains of weeds typical of rice paddies.
Domesticated, it should be noted, is not the same as cultivated. Domesticated types usually have a mutation that keeps the seed attached to the stalk. These non-shattering genes make the domesticated plant dependent on people to spread the seeds, and would be automatically selected for in the normal course of cultivation. As the authors note: “This trend toward an increasing proportion of domesticated types though time implies that rice was under cultivation at this time and that domestication traits were under selection.”
The paper offers clear evidence of rice cultivation and domestication 6500 years ago, but what does it say about the great japonica-indica divide? There are two views; that the two types were domesticated entirely independently, or that there was a single domestication event (selection of the non-shattering gene) which then found its way from japonica types to indica types, perhaps by crossing with wild varieties.
Fuller et al. do not treat this topic at length — that’s not what the paper is about, and Science does not allow for much discussion. I asked Fuller directly, and he said that he thinks “there is a good case archaeologically (and genetically) to be made for a separate origin in the middle Ganges”. So people there independently started to manage wild rice and to cultivate it, and then full domestication got under way around 1900 BCE, with the arrival from China of japonica types and the techniques to grow rice more effectively. He was kind enough to send another paper ((Fuller, D., & Qin, L. (2009). Water management and labour in the origins and dispersal of Asian rice. World Archaeology, 41 (1), 88-111 DOI: 10.1080/00438240802668321
And that looks like an amazingly interesting volume.)) which sets out the ideas in considerably more detail and throws fascinating light on the whole question of the cultural and social organisation needed to grow rice effectively. A parting thought from that:
We suggest that the spread of rice, which has played an important role in models of Neolithic population dispersal in Southeast Asia, may have been triggered by the development of more intensive management systems and thus have required certain social changes towards hierarchical societies rather than just rice cultivation per se.