- TRAFFIC says many traditional medicines are being over-exploited in Cambodia and Viet Nam. Via .
- New model of development more important than new green revolution, says IICA head.
- Baa baa black sheep, have you any genes?
- Food crisis, energy crisis; what about the water crisis? IWMI resurrects 2007 report. More here.
Nibbles: Chocolate, Africa cubed, Green wall
- “I think that in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar.”
- “Why should Africa be the only region in the world that is begging for food?” Hans Herren stiffs it to Jeffrey Sachs.
- Mapping, and then protecting, places where wildlife and pastoralists can survive climate change together.
- Jessica hearts Moringa. ((How do I get a picture of a heart here?))
- Green Wall of Trees to halt Sahara. Will any of them also be directly useful?
Milk in the Neolithic diet
Fancy chemistry on potsherds from a 6000-year-old Neolithic settlement on Lake Constance has revealed traces of “fat residues of pre-industrial ruminant milk, and young suckling calf/lamb adipose.” So, people drank milk and ate calf meat in Central Europe in 4000 BC. (Via.) That’s a follow-up to a paper a couple of years back giving evidence for cheese and yoghurt making in the late Neolithic.
Mathilda blogs cattle
I’ve been reading Mathilda37’s interesting blog about human evolution for a while now. What makes her particularly worth following from our eeyrie here at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog is that she frequently writes about domesticates too. Case in point: she’s just done a very useful roundup of DNA studies of cattle. Roundup. Cattle. Geddit?
Nibbles: Fungi, Cacao, Animal husbandry, China, Africa, Maize, Genebank
- Diverse strains + diverse substrates = diverse shiitake.
- Chocolate is from Mars. Jeremy comments: “A disease called witches”??? BBC Science reporting strikes again. Get the USDA’s version.
- Eldis on a roll this morning: Livestock and climate change in Africa, sustainability of Chinese agriculture, beyond magic bullets in African agriculture.
- EurekAlert! tries to catch up: Mexican landraces.
- Quality assured potato genebank.