- Yay! A new wheat disease answers Jeremy’s prayers.
- Tahitian vanilla; hybrid a long way from home.
- Small scale sales stomped on.
- Mixtures kinda sorta better, depending.
- Night soil kinda sorta good, depending.
Rethinking animal domestication
An article in the NY Times summarizes some interesting recent thinking about the beginning of animal domestication in the Mediterranean. It is based on an article in PNAS by Melinda Zader at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I leaned about it via Dienekes’Â Anthropology Blog, where you’ll find some additional links and some interesting comments.
The conventional way to time animal domestication has been to look for smaller boned animals in the archaelological record. But it seems that if you instead look for the first signs of human management of herds, rather than the morphological signal, you can push the date of domestication back a thousand years, to 11,000 years ago. There were multiple domestications of each livestock species, and different species originated in different areas within the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. Then it seems people moved these livestock, and the associated crops, by sea across and along the Mediterranean. These seafaring colonists established coastal Neolithic enclaves, from which agriculture spread inland. There was also “adoption of domesticates and domestic technologies by indigenous populations and the local domestication of some endemic species.”
It looks like we may be going back to a model of agricultural expansion based on the movement of people, rather than on the diffusion of technologies.
Nibbles for the road: Baobab, Breeding, Gardening, Earthworms, Taro, Pollinators, Llama, Trees, Chili peppers
- More on how the baobab is coming to Europe.
- Review of breeding for nutritionally improved crops.
- Book on the origins of British gardening.
- Earthworms “modulate the competition between grasses and legumes.”
- ACIAR publishes book on taro pests in the Pacific.
- UNEP launches global pollinator conservation initiative.
- Unusual use for livestock fetuses.
- “And she grows more than 100 types of trees…“
- “Along the equator, without access to refrigeration, you could be dead pretty quickly unless you can find a way to protect yourself against the microbes you ingest every day.”
Nibbles: Economics, Agricultural origins, Slow Food, Pollinators, India
- An economist designs a sustainable agricultural system. Good news: it includes genebanks, if only as an additional thought.
- Peruvian rock art marks transition between hunting/gathering and agriculture.
- A food garden on the White House lawn? Via Slow Food Nation, get your tickets quick. And follow the blog. Thanks, Colinski, and have a good time there.
- “The total economic value of pollination worldwide amounted to €153 billion, which represented 9.5% of the value of the world agricultural production used for human food in 2005.”
- “I want the farmers to get the message that what we are doing, what they will be doing when they embrace natural farming, is revolutionary.”
Re-synthesizing crops
Jeremy recently mused about the possibility of reconstructing the cultivated peanut. As coincidence would have it, a brace of papers just out look at the same thing for a couple of other crops.
A team from the US, Canada and Turkey describe in Euphytica how they reconstructed the modern cultivated dessert strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa) by crossing F. virginiana and F. chiloensis. That’s what happened in the 18th century in some gardens in Britanny once the Chilean strawberry, cultivated for a thousand years by the Mapuche, found its way there after its introduction to Europe by the French spy, Captain Amédée-François Frézier, and met the wild Virginia strawberry. That had started replacing the local cultivated F. vesca in European gardens up to a century before. The researchers were able to come up with significantly better varieties of dessert strawberry by being careful to choose a wider range of elite, complementary genotypes as parents.
And over at GRACE, Iranian and Japanese researchers looked for areas where cultivated tetraploid (durum) wheat is found together with the other putative parent of bread wheat, i.e. wild/weedy Aegilops tauschii. They found the two species in close proximity in two districts in the central Alborz Mountains. So, the “association hypothesized in the theory of bread wheat evolution staill exists in the area where bread wheat probably originated.” The paper does not report finding any natural hybrids, but it does suggest that further field studies should be undertaken, presumably to look for evidence of such introgression.