- “Take into account both women’s and men’s preferences when developing and introducing new varieties.”
- Rats!
- Domestication of figs pre-dates that of cereals?
- Neanderthals liked barbecue.
- Underutilized plant in homegarden a terror threat.
- Heirloom bean farmer feted by Washington Post, added to Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog blogroll.
- Orchards as hotspots of agrobiodiversity.
- “…grass pea is a ‘poster child’…”
Nibbles: Wheat disease, Vanilla, Market regulation, Mixtures
- 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.”