Category: History

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Domestication

Michael’s post on water buffalo genetic diversity and domestication reminded me that I was intending to point you all in the direction of Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog. Although Dienekes mainly blogs about the genetic diversity and evolution of humans, he does occasionally link to papers on animal domestication and related issues. He has an RSS feed, which makes it easy to monitor his blog. In the past couple of years he has pointed to interesting papers on:

Incidentally, a great paper reviewing the use of genetics and archaeology to document domestication came out last year and you can see the abstract here. Now, what’s really needed is for someone to bring together the human, livestock and crop genetic data.

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A new route for pigs and people across the Pacific

The standard story of Pacific colonization is that people and their crops and livestock spread across it in a generally southwestern direction. Scientists from Durham University and the University of Oxford are renavigating the details. They looked at DNA from various pigs across the Pacific, and conclude that their journey may have started in what is now Vietnam. It has always been assumed that the people and their agriculture traveled together as a single package. This research indicates that different parts of the package took different routes.

There’s more detail at a Durham web site about pig domestication, but the actual paper does not seem to be available online yet. Here’s the press release announcing it.

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Late blight origins

Ask anyone working in plant genetic resources for an example of the importance of growing genetically diverse crops and chances are that sooner or later they’ll mention the Irish potato famine, caused by the late blight fungus Phytophtora infestans in the 1840s. But for such an important – and iconic – disease, it is amazing how what we think we know about it keeps changing. There’s been a re-think recently about which strain of the fungus actually caused the outbreak in Ireland. And now there’s DNA work to figure out where the pathogen came from. The debate on that point seems now to have been decided in favour of the Andes.

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Audible Darwin

It is easy to forget sometimes that The Origin of Species actually starts with a lengthy discussion of genetic diversity in crops, ornamentals, livestock and pets, although of course Darwin doesn’t call it that. He calls it “variation under domestication,” and you can now hear his seminal words, by downloading 24 hours’ worth of audio files from here. There’s a also a link to an e-text of the book.

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Pharaonic laxatives

I blogged some time ago about a new project at the University of Manchester to document Pharaoh’s herbal medicines, but there was not much detail in the press release I quoted at the time. Now there’s a much fuller article on Discovery. It seems that the ancient Egyptians were martyrs to constipation.