- DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
- Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
- “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
- “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
- “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
- Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
- TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.
Iris in Japan and Tuscany
We went to the Hirishoge exhibition here in Rome some time ago, and very impressive it was too, but I don’t remember seeing this particular woodcut.
I’ve in fact only just come across it, on Flickr, where there is this fascinating commentary:
In the village of Horikiri in suburban Edo, gardeners grew a year-round variety of flowers and were particularly famous for the iris shown here, “hanashobu,” well suited to this swampy land. In this print Hiroshige has shown three, almost-life-size, detailed specimens of the nineteenth-century hanashobu hybrids and in the distance, sightseers from Edo are admiring the blossoms. In the 1870’s the cultivation of hanashobu had begun to spread rapidly in Europe and America and the developed into a booming export market for the gardeners of Horikiri. The Horikiri plantations began to wane in the 1920’s and eventually turned over to wartime food production. After the war, one of them was revived and is now a public park, particularly popular in May when the flowers are in bloom.
Multiple origins of agriculture debated
The point is that agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways. The question in both cases is: what were the common denominators of those circumstances?
That’s from a post over at The Archaeobotanist which starts by talking about “modern human behaviour” rather than agriculture, but sees parallel processes at play in the origin of both. So, in the same way that “the cognitive architecture for modern behaviour was around but the innovations that we regard as ‘modern’ emerged when social and environmental circumstances demanded,” and this happened in different places at different times, so likewise the “cognitive architecture” for agriculture was widespread and there were therefore many “centres in which societies converged on agriculture,” with the concomitant “behavioural changes towards manipulation of the environment in favour of the reproduction of a few food species,” triggered by particular “social and environmental circumstances.”
Fair enough, but how is this new? There’s a comment on the post in which Paul Gepts makes this very point
…I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue. The concept of centers of origin/domestication has been around for a century, thanks to Vavilov, Harlan, et al. … I must be missing something here, because for some time agriculture has been considered an example of multiple, independent inventions.
I’m looking forward to following this heavyweight exchange.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Distillation, Salmon, Banana, Stem rust, Red rice
- Great photo-essay on the water buffalo.
- A renaissance of gin production in London. Cheers!
- Not bad photo essay on the salmon migration.
- Special issue of Ethnobotany Research & Applications on banana domestication.
- Afghanistan readies for Ug99. Because it doesn’t have enough problems already.
- Saving red rice. Note comment from Bhuwon.
Nibbles: Fisheries, Mangroves, European bison, Dormouse, Eating & drinking heirlooms, Apios, Kombucha, Organic and health
- Donwload a guide to sustainable sushi.
- It was World Mangrove Day last Sunday. Who knew.
- Poland/Belarus’s Bialowieza Primeval Forest and its bison threatened by climate change, politics.
- Endangered dormouse found crossing highway, but is it the edible sort beloved of the Romans?
- “Endangered heritage breeds have one saving grace: They’re generally tasty.” Even in cocktails.
- Radix gets to grips with Apios americana. Good luck!
- Did someone say fermentation?
- Did someone say single-issue bores?