How did collards get to remote oases on the edge of the Sahara? That’s what ethnobotanists Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have been looking into for like 20 years now, and it’s a fascinating story. Which you can read about in detail in their paper in Economic Botany. They also present an abbreviated form of the argument in The Conversation. Which got Nibbled some months back, though without giving anything away. But actually what I recommend you do is listen to Jeremy interview the intrepid duo in the latest episode of Eat This Podcast.
Brainfood: Silk Road, Wheat domestication, Peanut domestication, Olive wild relatives, Pearl millet movement, Maori horticulture, Wild meat, Fermentation
- Domesticated: How Cultivated Species Altered Ancient Silk Road Societies. Different stages of adopting and intensifying the use of domesticates (livestock, horses, and later crops) reshaped economies, mobility, and social organization in north-central Asia, ultimately enabling the emergence of the Silk Road. So domesticated species were as active drivers of Eurasian historical development as of prehistory.
- Ancient grains illuminate the mosaic origin of domesticated wheat. Domesticated wheat arose through repeated hybridizations between distinct wild populations carrying complementary non-shattering spike mutations, followed by ongoing gene flow and regional adaptation, making domestication a prolonged and interconnected process. Long before the result got to the Silk Road.
- A single hybrid origin of cultivated peanut. Domestication of the peanut seems to have been easier than that of wheat.
- A synthetic eco-evolutionary proposal for the conservation of wild relatives of the olive tree. If we ever have to re-domesticate the olive, we should make sure these 53 wild populations are conserved.
- Westward expansion of pearl millet agriculture into the Lac de Guiers basin, Senegal, by c. AD 200. I wonder what the Sahelian equivalent of the Silk Road was.
- Horticultural intensification and plant-based diets of 18th century CE Waikato Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. At least some Maori ate predominantly sweet potato and taro during the Traditional Period. Which of course were brought to Aotearoa via the ara moana, which, stretching a point, is the South Pacific equivalent of the Silk Road.
- Increase in wild animal consumption across Central Africa. Yeah, but who needs domesticated species anyway.
- Fermentation as food pedagogy: insights into how teaching fermentation facilitates engagement with the food system. Are fermentation microbes domesticated?
Nibbles: Crop mapping, Climate change impacts, Rice cheese, Andean blueberry, Rare apples, Hungarian genebank, Old seed collection
- AI doesn’t recognize tropical agriculture very well.
- So presumably it can’t easily be used in assessing climate change impacts in agricultural heritage systems? FAO has some ideas on how to do it.
- Maybe rice heritage systems can be used to make cheese.
- I bet Andean blueberry (Vaccinium floribundum) goes great with rice cheese.
- But if not, heritage apples will probably do.
- The Hungarian genebank is hoping to inject heritage grains into non-heritage agricultural systems. AI and FAO unavailable for comment.
- Maybe AI can help with the mystery of this old seed collection at the Natural History Museum, London.
Brainfood: History edition
- Phylogenetics and evolution of Digitaria grasses, including cereal crops fonio, raishan and Polish millet. The history of wild Digitaria goes back 2–6 million years.
- Biogeography of Crop Progenitors and Wild Plant Resources in the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka. This is what the distribution of crop wild relatives looked like in West Asia 10 thousand years ago or thereabouts. No Digitaria, but plenty of other stuff.
- Ancient use and long-distance transport of the Four Corners Potato (Solanum jamesii) across the Colorado Plateau: Implications for early stages of domestication. At roughly the same time, a couple continents and an ocean over, a local potato species was being processed outside its rage. Was it cultivated? Do the math.
- State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing. And a few thousand years later, there were domesticated grains, states, and taxes. In that order. Do the math.
- The Archaeology of Olive Oil Production in Roman and Pre-Roman Italy. Pretty sure the Romans had a state and taxes. They also had domesticated olives.
- Wines of Fire and Earth: Exploring the Volcanic Terroirs of the Canary Islands – a Case Study. No Romans on the Canaries, but plenty of vines.
- Black Death Land Abandonment Drove European Diversity Losses. The Romans and their successors, with their cereals, olives and grapes, were surprisingly good for landscape floristic diversity. The Black Death, not so much.
- The decades-old fantasy of enhancing pigeonpea productivity. Well that’s a bit of a letdown after a 6 million year journey.
- Past, present and future of local crop evolution. That’s because we needed Indigenous people and local communities to show us the way.
Nibbles: Agricultural expansion maps, Brassica diversity, Not against the grain, South African seedbanks, Safer peanuts, Diné seedbank
- Agriculture is bad for natural ecosystems. But great for maps, you have to admit.
- Greens are good for you. And this is a great roundup of the latest scholarship on brassica evolution, domestication and diversity. You’ll find most of the paper quoted in past Brainfoods.
- Grains are great. Especially with greens.
- Thank goodness for household seed banking. Especially in conjunction with the formal kind.
- All so we can breed a better peanut. And cut down more natural ecosystem?
- No, there’s community genebanks for that too…