The programme for the ASA-CSSA-SSSA International Annual Meetings in November is up. The genetic resources sessions look very solid, as ever. And the prestigious Calvin Sperling Memorial Lecture is to be given by our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Robert Hijmans on a topic we’ve blogged about often here, climate change and agrobiodiversity.
Nibbles: Dogs squared, Afghanistan’s poppies, Rice at IRRI, Book on sapodilla chicle in Mexico, Opuntia, Trees
- DNA survey of African village dogs reveals as much diversity as in East Asian village dogs, undermines current ideas about where domestication took place.
- Fossil doubles age of dog domestication.
- “When children felt like buying candy, they ran into their father’s fields and returned with a few grams of opium folded inside a leaf.”
- “The rice, a traditional variety called kintoman, came from my grandfather’s farm. It had an inviting aroma, tasty, puffy and sweet. Unfortunately, it is rarely planted today.”
- “An era of synthetic gums ushered in the near death of their profession, and there are only a handful of men that still make a living by passing their days in the jungle collecting chicle latex…The generational changes in this boom-and-bust lifestyle reflect a pattern that has occurred with numerous extractive economies…”
- Morocco markets prickly pear cactus products.
- TreeAid says that sustainable agriculture depends on, well, trees.
Multiple origins of agriculture debated
The point is that agriculture, like modern human behaviour, was not a one time great invention, but the product of social and environmental circumstances to which human groups with the same cognitive potential responded in parallel ways. The question in both cases is: what were the common denominators of those circumstances?
That’s from a post over at The Archaeobotanist which starts by talking about “modern human behaviour” rather than agriculture, but sees parallel processes at play in the origin of both. So, in the same way that “the cognitive architecture for modern behaviour was around but the innovations that we regard as ‘modern’ emerged when social and environmental circumstances demanded,” and this happened in different places at different times, so likewise the “cognitive architecture” for agriculture was widespread and there were therefore many “centres in which societies converged on agriculture,” with the concomitant “behavioural changes towards manipulation of the environment in favour of the reproduction of a few food species,” triggered by particular “social and environmental circumstances.”
Fair enough, but how is this new? There’s a comment on the post in which Paul Gepts makes this very point
…I am somewhat surprised that the issue of parallel inventions of agriculture is still an issue. The concept of centers of origin/domestication has been around for a century, thanks to Vavilov, Harlan, et al. … I must be missing something here, because for some time agriculture has been considered an example of multiple, independent inventions.
I’m looking forward to following this heavyweight exchange.
Mobile phones track invasives
Smart phones are being used to map invasive plants. Why not crop wild relatives? Or other agrobiodiversity for that matter.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Distillation, Salmon, Banana, Stem rust, Red rice
- Great photo-essay on the water buffalo.
- A renaissance of gin production in London. Cheers!
- Not bad photo essay on the salmon migration.
- Special issue of Ethnobotany Research & Applications on banana domestication.
- Afghanistan readies for Ug99. Because it doesn’t have enough problems already.
- Saving red rice. Note comment from Bhuwon.