From the latest Tangled Bank blog carnival, a couple of relevant pieces. Felicia gives a personal account of her fascination with honeybees and there’s an account of the domestication of the dog (which I can’t seem to access). Lots more that is interesting, but not relevant to agricultural biodiversity.
Earliest known rice?
It’s late, and I really should get to bed, but I cannot ignore my duty to inform you of a paper just published in Nature. Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China by Y. Zong, Z. Chen, J. B. Innes, C. Chen, Z. Wang and H. Wang describes how, 7,700 years ago, people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze converted brackish swamps into rice paddies that remained pretty productive for a couple of hundred years until the sea upped and swallowed the area. There’s a lot more to be gleaned from the paper, which is probably behind a paywall (I can’t check) but will nevertheless be picked up around the world. I’ll look out for a story in the China Daily tomorrow.
Later … Nothing I could see in the paper here, but the LA Times and National Geographic have more.
How domestication happens
Blog commentary on a paper about serendipitous backyard domestication.
Dogs behaving well
Dogs are not dumbed-down wolves.
Pigs didn’t fly, walked to Europe
We know that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent about 12,000 years ago and then spread across Europe between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago. But what exactly was it that spread? Was it the idea of agriculture or agriculturalists themselves? Just-published work on the DNA of modern and ancient pigs says it was probably a bit of both. It seems that Middle Eastern farmers migrated into Europe carrying their agrobiodiversity with them — crops and domesticated animals. But, as far as the pig was concerned anyway, they soon adopted a locally domesticated version in preference to the Middle Eastern type they had brought along.