Category: History

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A famous Italian lentil

I spent the weekend in the Abruzzo region of Italy, which is kind of in the middle of the peninsula, both north-south and east-west. L’Aquila, the seat of the provincial government, is a couple of hours’ drive east of Rome. One of the places we visited was Santo Stefano di Sessanio, which is actually in the Gran Sasso National Park. It’s a pleasant enough medieval village, very well restored, though it has a whiff of Disneyland about it these days, especially in the summer.

Anyway, one of the many interesting things about this place is that it is famous for a particular kind of lentil — very small, tasty and apparently not needing to be soaked before cooking. And expensive. I don’t think the Lenticchia di Santo Stefano (photo below) has been protected like France’s Puy lentil, though.

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Incidentally, I came across that last link purely by coincidence today. I was going to talk about the Santo Stefano lentil anyway, but then a Google alert sent me to a posting in the Cookthink blog which mentions an article in The New Yorker about the place where I work, and refers back to the earlier piece about lentils.

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Backyard domestication

There’s a “dump heap” hypothesis of agricultural origins which suggests that people first got interested in actively managing and manipulating plants for food or other products when they saw them sprouting out of piles of garbage in and about settlements. There they could observe them daily and experiment with them. A slight variation on this theme — involving corrals in pastoralist campsites rather than garbage dumps — has been proposed for the domestication of quinoa.

One of the things that might have happened in these fertile micro-environments in close proximity to human habitations is that different related species might have been brought accidentally together, leading to hybridization and the development of interesting new — polyploid — types. But there really hasn’t been much empirical evidence for this.

No more. A new paper ((Colin E. Hughes, Rajanikanth Govindarajulu, Ashley Robertson, Denis L. Filer, Stephen A. Harris, and C. Donovan Bailey. Serendipitous backyard hybridization and the origin of crops. PNAS published August 17, 2007, 10.1073/pnas.0702193104.)) looks at the domestication of the legume tree Leucaena in Mexico, where it is grown for food (it is also used as a fodder in some parts of the world). A variety of evidence is discussed which suggests that there has indeed been much hybridization among up to 13 different wild species of Leucaena in Mexican backyards. This has proved “a potent trigger for domestication.” The authors think a similar thing also happened in Mexico with two other perennial crops, Agave and Opuntia.

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Mapping wild bovids

Michael’s post on the kouprey made me realize how ignorant I am on the subject of wild bovids. That, and news of the launch of the new GBIF portal, prompted some online fun and games last night.

I’ll just give you the edited highlights here. But I guarantee that playing with the GBIF data portal will keep you busy — and entertained — for hours.

I searched for all Bos spp specimens that GBIF has occurrence data for, then downloaded the resulting kml file and opened it in Google Earth. The map above is just a view of the records for SE Asia. Not that many, and none for the kouprey. Bos javanicus is the banteng. The records in southern Vietnam refer to specimens (stuffed, presumably, or maybe just skins, I’m not sure) from the Field Museum in Chicago.

I got quite excited when I saw the name of the collector. One T. Roosevelt. But it was not to be. This T. Roosevelt collected (shot?) the banteng specimen now in the Field Museum in 1929, which is ten years after the first President Roosevelt died.

I also did similar things for a couple of crop wild relatives, but I’ll keep that for another time. Remember, one of the data providers to GBIF is SINGER, to the tune of over half a million records of germplasm accessions of crops and wild crop relatives.

Later that day: So GBIF has a thing where you can send feedback on individual records, so I did that for T. Roosevelt’s banteng and within a few hours I had a email back from Larry Heaney at the Field Museum. It turns out that we’re dealing here with Teddy Jr, the president’s son, who spent a lot of time on expeditions in Asia. Larry says that there are also some specimens around collected by Teddy Jr’s brother, Kermit. Thanks, Larry. I don’t know quite why, but this whole story made my day.