History

May 19, 2011

The spread of agriculture in print

Three ahead-of-print papers on the spread of agriculture in Current Anthropology:

The Neolithic Southwest Asian Founder Crops — Ehud Weiss, Daniel Zohary
Westward Ho! — Peter Rowley-Conwy (that would be about Europe)
Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals — Peter Bellwood

Things are hectic at the moment, so the penetrating summary and free-wheeling synthesis you’ve come to expect will have to wait. Unless of course you want to do them. The papers are free to access, after all…

May 17, 2011May 17, 2011

Identifying the source of Bluefields’ breadfruits

Frank Lohmann asked an intriguing question in a comment on a recent post about breadfruit:

I have several breadfruit trees, which most likely go back to the trees captain Bligh brought to Jamaica, does anyone know which variety that is?

The reason Frank gave for believing his plants to date back to Capt. Bligh is “because he brought them to Bluefields were I live and planted them here.”

I asked for some photos and showed them to Diane Ragone of the Breadfruit Institute in Hawaii. She said that it is certainly plausible that the tree is from Tahiti.

Pressed for a variety name, this is what she said:

It’s so hard to tell with the Tahitian varieties. There are so many of these Polynesian triploid types with round fruit and deeply lobed leaves. Perhaps Rare, which was one of the varieties that Bligh noted in the Bounty log, but no mention in the Providence log as to what he actually brought to the Caribbean. A paper on that is on my too-long and neglected list of papers on breadfruit!

So we’ll just have to wait for a positive ID. But Frank could well be right that his breadfruits go back to the famed captain. I for one will choose to believe they do.

May 16, 2011May 16, 2011

Nibbles: Hunger foods, Pollinators, Sacred Seeds, Neglected species, Grasses, Yields, Hawaiian History

Mining Mungo Park for info about famine foods. Bamboo seeds and, perhaps, baobab pods.
The big prerequisite for EU funding is a good acronym. STEP — status and trends of European pollinators — gets the go ahead.
Sacred Seeds project at Missouri Botanical Garden announces new partners in India.
New Bioversity project to extend importance of work on neglected species in India, Nepal and Bolivia.
How to manage diverse grasses.
More on climate change and maize yields. “[I]f anything heat tolerance is declining.”
Ancient agriculture in Hawaii.

May 16, 2011May 13, 2011

Brainfood: Millet biscuits, Wheat micronutrients, Diversification and C footprint, Agroforestry, Epazote, Grape history, Belgian farmers, Millet phenology, Species migration, Barley domestication, Sheep genetics

Quality characteristics of biscuits prepared from finger millet seed coat based composite flour. They’re nutritious. Crocodile Dundee on the tastiness of the iguana may, however, apply.
Minerals and trace elements in a collection of wheat landraces from the Canary Islands. There are differences, but environment and agronomic practices could affect them.
Lowering carbon footprint of durum wheat by diversifying cropping systems. Yes, by 7-34%, depending on how the diversification was done.
Effect of shading by baobab (Adansonia digitata) and néré (Parkia biglobosa) on yields of millet (Pennisetum glaucum) and taro (Colocasia esculenta) in parkland systems in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Taro is a shade lover; grow it under néré, and vice versa.
Ethnobotanical, morphological, phytochemical and molecular evidence for the incipient domestication of Epazote (Chenopodium ambrosioides L.: Chenopodiaceae) in a semi-arid region of Mexico. Good to know; I love epazote.
Grape varieties (Vitis vinifera L.) from the Balearic Islands: genetic characterization and relationship with Iberian Peninsula and Mediterranean Basin. See the grand sweep of European history unfold.
Microsatellite characterization of grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) genetic diversity in Asturias (Northern Spain). No evidence of communication with the previous group.
Plant economy of the first farmers of central Belgium (Linearbandkeramik, 5200–5000 b.c.). They were dope fiends.
Selection for earlier flowering crop associated with climatic variations in the Sahel. Compared to 1976 millet samples, samples collected in 2003 had shorter lifecycle (due to an early flowering allele at the PHYC locus increasing in frequency), and a reduction in plant and spike size. So you don’t need new varieties, the old ones will adapt to climate change. Oh, and BTW, there’s been no genetic erosion.
Do species’ traits predict recent shifts at expanding range edges? No.
The domestication syndrome genes responsible for the major changes in plant form in the Triticeae crops. Failure to disarticulate and 6-rows in barley, in detail. Part of a Special Issue on Barley.
The genetics of colour in fat-tailed sheep: a review. I didn’t know karakul had fat tails.

May 14, 2011

Nibbles: Nabhan, Tilapia, Crowdsourcing taxonomy, Drought, Bees

Gary Nabhan on the West Bank wall.
Tilapia not so bad after all?
Yet another example of crowdsourcing in science.
Yet another approach to breeding for (mild) drought tolerance.
Yet another reason why natural history collections are so important.