- Save food diversity, chef says.
- All well and good, but Nutella is driving hazelnut monoculture in Italy.
- Let them make wood vinegar!
- No doubt perry pears will be next for the monoculture treatment.
- Bananas are way ahead of pears, perry or otherwise.
Nibbles: Apple diversity, Quinoa diversity, Potato diversity, Indian coconut, Mead recipe
- The need to diversify apple breeding.
- Unlikely pean to the world quinoa core collection. I believe we may have blogged about it.
- And the Commonwealth Potato Collection rounds off today’s trifecta of cool genebanks.
- Kerala’s coconut problems only start with root wilt. Aren’t there coconut collections that could be used to solve them? Well of course there are.
- Recreating bochet, a medieval mead, sounds really hard, but worth it. Someone want to start a mead collection?
Nibbles: Forage grasses, Fruit trees, Robusta coffee, 3D evaluation, Indian genebank, European botanic gardens, Pastoralism book, Mojito decolonized
Nibbles: Deforestation, Grizzly genetics, Animal domestication, Wheat drones, Okra experiments, Millet survey, The Common Table
- 26 million hectares of forest were lost in 2020.
- Genetic groups in grizzly bears line up with Indigenous languages in British Columbia. How about the trees, though?
- But why weren’t grizzly bears domesticated? Because they’re not friendly, feedable, fecund and family-friendly.
- Drones and wheat breeding.
- Crowdsourcing okra evaluation. No drones involved.
- Health-conscious urban Indians eat millet for health reasons. Goes great with okra.
- The Common Table: sharing stories about reforming the food system. Like a couple of the above.
Brainfood: Predicting society, Andean Neolithic, Ancient watermelon, Iberian silos, Scythian lifeways, Rabbit domestication, British cockerels, Azeri buffaloes, E African caprines, Persian fruit miniatures
- Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia. Large, complex human societies arise where there is a long history of agriculture and war; and not, interestingly, where potential productivity is highest.
- Diet, Mobility, Technology, and Lithics: Neolithization on the Andean Altiplano, 7.0–3.5 ka. It seems the rise of large, complex societies arose in the Andes is associated with the change in projectile technology from atlatl to archery.
- Three-dimensional X-ray-computed tomography of 3300- to 6000-year-old Citrullus seeds from Libya and Egypt compared to extant seeds throws doubts on species assignments. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, people were snacking on watermelon seeds.
- From the earliest farmers to the first urban centres: a socio-economic analysis of underground storage practices in north-eastern Iberia. You can track socioeconomic changes in ancient Iberian cultures (c. 5600–50 BC) via the size and morphology of their grain silos. No word on projectile technologies nor watermelons though.
- Re-evaluating Scythian lifeways: Isotopic analysis of diet and mobility in Iron Age Ukraine. Meanwhile, back on those steppes, 700-200 BC, some people were relatively settled, with their agro-pastoralism and millet agriculture, while others moved. So much for warlike nomads. Must have had watermelons by then, surely.
- Why were New World rabbits not domesticated? Because they’re solitary, dispersed and there’s too many different types. Most North American evidence of management comes from Teotihuacan, ~AD 1–550.
- Estimating the age of domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus L. 1758) cockerels through spur development. In Britain, Iron Age and Roman cockerels died way too old to have been kept for meat, and were thus probably also used for rituals and cockfighting. No word on the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.
- The earliest water buffalo in the Caucasus: shifting animals and people in the medieval Islamic world. The water buffalo came to Azerbaijan with Islam in the 7-9th centuries.
- Collagen fingerprinting traces the introduction of caprines to island Eastern Africa. Goats from the 7th century CE, sheep a couple hundred years later. No word on water buffaloes.
- An illustrated review on manifestation of pome fruit germplasm in the historic miniatures of ancient Persia. 14-18th century Persian artists had a thing for pears, quinces and apples, and drew them very accurately.