Category: History

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Potato foundation story

You may remember a post a few weeks back on the origins of potato late blight. Now comes news of a DNA study which looked at the origin of the European potato itself.

The spud was introduced into Europe via the Canary Islands in the mid-16th century. The authors of the study compared landraces currently grown in the Canaries, which are thought to be the descendents of those early introductions, with material from Chile and the Andes. There has long been controversy about whether European varieties trace their origins to one or the other of these places.

It turns out the answer is probably both: there were

“multiple early introductions of both Andean and Chilean germplasm to the Canary Islands and to Europe,” said Dr. David Spooner, co-author of the Crop Science study.

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Traditional farming in Spain … and elsewhere

Trillo-2-2 National Geographic has a fine feature called Photo of the Day. Today’s shows a Spanish farmer with a wooden, sled-like contraption with sharp rocks embedded in the bottom. It’s a threshing board, used at harvest time to cut up straw, separate cereal grains from chaff and break open chickpea pods. Now, unfortunately I can’t just take the NatGeo photo and put it up here for you to see, you’ll just have to go to their site, but I did look around for an illustration that was in the public domain, and I found it at Answers.com, in a fascinating article on the history of these tools. The NatGeo photo is worth seeing, though. While surfing, I also ended up at the Food Museum Online, which I’d never come across before. It’s not the prettiest looking site, but it has some great content, including illustrations of traditional farming practices and tools. There’s also a blog, with a feed.

Photo of a Spanish “trillo” by José-Manuel Benito

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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.