- No member of the plant kingdom has ever been so willfully and stubbornly misunderstood.
- EU funds US$ 300 million to develop galip nut (Canarium indicum) in New Britain.
- Happy Birthday, Fort Collins.
- First, pocket pigs. Now, mini-cows. Watch our hits go through the roof.
- The story of the mother who went to Hell to protect her daughter.
- Kiribati to get atoll agriculture development centre. But where will they put it?
Nibbles: Sheep, Media, Potato
- A sheep breed back from the brink in Tunisia.
- IIED paper on Biodiversity and the media. Thanks, Susanna.
- Lima to boast Potato Museum.
Nibbles: Horse milk, GMOs
- Marketing Indonesian horse milk as a nutraceutical. Good luck with that.
- Nick Cohen on Prince Charles on GMOs: “Like Marie Antoinette, he sees the poor as happiest when they have their place in a natural order, with royalty at its head.”
Cow Parade
There was an article in the local paper on Saturday which described how some of the exhibits at the recent Cow Parade in San Jose were a bit worse for wear and were being repaired. Well, I’d never heard of Cow Parade, but it sounds like fun. You can check out the entries for the San Jose event online. I just wish there was more phenotypic diversity on show, all the entries in the Wikipedia article look like basically the same breed.
Rethinking animal domestication
An article in the NY Times summarizes some interesting recent thinking about the beginning of animal domestication in the Mediterranean. It is based on an article in PNAS by Melinda Zader at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I leaned about it via Dienekes’Â Anthropology Blog, where you’ll find some additional links and some interesting comments.
The conventional way to time animal domestication has been to look for smaller boned animals in the archaelological record. But it seems that if you instead look for the first signs of human management of herds, rather than the morphological signal, you can push the date of domestication back a thousand years, to 11,000 years ago. There were multiple domestications of each livestock species, and different species originated in different areas within the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. Then it seems people moved these livestock, and the associated crops, by sea across and along the Mediterranean. These seafaring colonists established coastal Neolithic enclaves, from which agriculture spread inland. There was also “adoption of domesticates and domestic technologies by indigenous populations and the local domestication of some endemic species.”
It looks like we may be going back to a model of agricultural expansion based on the movement of people, rather than on the diffusion of technologies.