Brainfood: Broomcorn millet, Domestication, Stand diversity, South African ornamentals, Rice wild relatives, Agriculture under climate change, Wheat domestication

Digging around for evidence of horse domestication

I could have sworn I had already blogged about the fascinating recent archaeological finds in Saudi Arabia which seem to have pushed the evidence of horse domestication back to 9000 years ago and to a somewhat different area. But if I did, I can’t find the post. Uzbekistan, yes. A genetic nibble from China, yes.

But nothing about the Al-Magar finds. No matter, though, because now horsetalk.co.nz has a great roundup not only of the Saudi findings, but also of those from different sites in Kazakhstan, complete with photos. Findings which may well lead to a slight change in the geographical reference in the following pithy summary of the genetic evidence that we also blogged about recently.

Horses were domesticated in a broad area across the Eurasian steppe, and in this species the husbandry style has left considerable signatures. It is presumed that mares were domesticated numerous times, but that only a few stallions contributed to the genetic make-up of the domestic horse.

Nibbles: Bioinformatics, Extension, Apples, Potatoes, Research, Cacao genebank, Cassava hope, Rice and Striga

Brainfood: Football nutrition, Sorghum markers, Alpine herb, Gap analysis, Evolutionary breeding, Aphids, Birds and farmland, Cameroon forests

The Smithsonian serves spuds

Charles Mann of 1491 and 1493 fame takes on the potato in the Smithsonian Magazine. So far as I can tell, all of the photographs are indeed of potatoes. It is kind of fun that one of the people who contributed to the amassing of the thousands of varieties in the germplasm collection maintained on behalf of the world by the International Potato Center has commented on CIP’s link to the article on Facebook.