It is with great sadness that I write to tell you of the death of my father, Hugh Harries, moderator of the Coconut Time Line. Many of you will have known Dad personally and others will have come across his work in the field. Some of you may have known he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2006. He passed away peacefully on 7 February 2019 with his family around him. His funeral will take place in Weymouth, England, this Friday 22 February.
I know Dad would want the Coconut Time Line and Knowledge Network to continue after him. Please contact me directly if you think you might be able to help in this regard.
The Harlan III symposium, dedicated to the Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication, Evolution, and Utilization of Genetic Resources, and initially planned for 2018, is now scheduled for 3-7 June 2019. The call for abstracts and registration are open. Thanks to Anne-Céline Thuillet, on behalf of the organizing committee, for letting us know.
A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.
Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.
The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.
