Ancient Andean agriculture

Meanwhile, on the Western slopes of the Andes, at about the same time as their cousins half a world away were domesticating the cat — which is a lot earlier than has been thought — people in what is now northern Peru were growing peanuts, squash and cotton. That’s according to well-dated macrofossils, as reported in a paper co-authored by our friend and peanut expert David Williams, and picked up in the mainstream press.

We’ve blogged before about recent work that is pushing back the date of agriculture in the New World. There’s a great review of the latest thinking on the “roots of agriculture,” including in the Americas, in the latest Science, but you’ll need a subscription to read it, unfortunately. Anyway, to summarize heroically the new consensus arising from collaboration among geneticists and archaeologists, it seems the process of crop domestication probably took much longer than previously imagined, thousands rather than hundreds of years. And that it may have started at about the same time in different parts of the world, perhaps as a result of changes in climate (and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere).

How the cat became a pet

A DNA study of almost a thousand wild and domestic cats from around the world is helping to unravel the evolutionary history of this most numerous of household pets. There are five wild subspecies of nearest-relatives, including one in the Near East, from which all domesticated cats are derived, though there has been subsequent hybridization of house cats with local wild populations here and there. Modern cat breeds can trace their origin to at least five mothers domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around the same time as agriculture started, over 9,000 years ago. And, coincidentally, there’s news also today of archaeological evidence from nearby Cyprus backing up that date.

Micro, mini, what’s the difference?

511Anbszh4L. Ss500 -1 Now, I know I’m a pedant, and biased, but for me, micro has always been smaller than mini. Cars, skirts, whatever; micro is smaller than mini. It’s, like, a rule. So when our friends at the Global Facilitation Unit sent flyers for a book called “Ecological Implications of Minilivestock: Potential Of Insects, Rodents, Frogs And Snails”, I was puzzled. Insects, frogs and rodents aren’t mini, they’re distinctly micro. Capybara and beaver are probably mini-rodents, but the rest are micro too. The reason, I guess, is that the term “microlivestock” had already been snaffled, by “Microlivestock: Little-Known Small Animals With a Promising Economic Future”, a wonderful book that I had the pleasure of reading, and writing about, when it came out in 1991. Except that BEDIM, the Bureau for Exchange and Distribution of Information on Minilivestock, that is responsible for this book, was “created circa 1990”. My brain aches just thinking about it.

Anyway, what you call them is besides the point. Small animals make big sense. They eat things big animals don’t. They are much more productive per unit area, and probably per unit food too. They’re nutritious, especially for people who cannot afford to eat macrolivestock. Ecological Implications of Minilivestock is not brand, spanking new, but then neither is the idea of eating insects. Indeed, the editor sent the information to the GFU in response to a tiny article here about a Kenyan researcher who was promoting insects as human food. As a contribution to broadening the biodiversity of productions systems and diets, we are happy to give it some attention.