Category: Domestication

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Cattle domestication

I was going to write about some recent papers on the domestication of cattle myself, but things got a bit hectic and I didn’t find time. I did, however, find Razib’s post at Gene Expression, and I commend it to you. Of course there’s a lot in there about the genes for milk production, and some worrying nonsense about using genome information to breed better cattle or, to put it another way “accelerating livestock genetic improvement for milk and meat production”. Breeders making use of super-sires and super-ovulating cows have already done a pretty good job of reducing the diversity of extant cattle, and I for one am not convinced by the need for ever more efficient use-once-then-dispose-of milk machines. But I haven’t read the papers, so I can’t comment further. I am intrigued, however, by this statement, quoted by Razib:

Domestication and artificial selection appear to have left detectable signatures of selection within the cattle genome, yet the current levels of diversity within breeds are at least as great as exists within humans.

If we’re not suffering from having passed through genetic narrows, maybe cattle aren’t either. Maybe they’re just suffering.

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A little little barley goes a long way

Like I say, not a day goes by. Yesterday, ramie. Today, little barley. As in:

They likely ate sunflower, marsh elder, two types of chenopod—a family that includes spinach and beets—and possibly squash and little barley, according to the findings. The people also grew bottle gourd to make into containers.

That would be the Riverton people living three thousand years ago along the Wabash River in present-day Illinois.

The Riverton crops may have “added to what was [already] a successful life” for the ancient Americans, said Brian Redmond, curator and head of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

Yes, because…

…[b]efore they began farming, the Riverton people lived among bountiful river valleys and lakes, apparently eating a healthy and diverse diet of nuts, white-tailed deer, fish, and shellfish, the study says.

So the Riverton people were not reacting to some environmental stress as a matter of survival when they became agriculturalists, but rather “engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation.” Good for them.

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Asian cattle

Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology gives an overview of the cattle of Asia, with pictures. A couple of take home messages, for me. One is that the domestication of various bovids is pretty complex, with hybrids, feral forms, wild relatives and all combinations thereof in existence. The other is this conversation-stopping tidbit: “domestic cattle don’t need to shiver or employ other thermoregulatory tricks even in temperatures approaching -20° C”. Why not? Go read Darren’s post, and then reconsider the “fleshy dewlaps, tall dorsal ridges and other structures” that are typical of tropical types.

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Nibbles: French fries, Maple syrup, Cooking heirlooms, Salmon, Ancient booze, Rice domestication