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Pasta alle vongole

Some 160,000 years ago, with the Earth in the middle of an Ice Age, a group of modern-looking humans lived in a cave a few kilometers from the sea near the southern tip of Africa. There they huddled around hearths, chipped stone bladelets, and perhaps decorated their bodies or objects with a red pigment. The site, Pinnacle Point near Mosselbaai in South Africa, has just been unveiled to the public, and it is touted as the earliest evidence of human coastal settlement, and of our use of the sea’s resources as food. Yes, because our human troop in the cave also feasted on shellfish and other seafood. Anthropologists think that many similar sites existed, but that their remains have been washed away as sea level rose with the melting of the glaciers. The Pinnacle Point cave is now a sea cliff, 15 metres above the waves of the Indian Ocean.

The excavators of the site think that during the Ice Age savannah productivity was low, and human populations set out in search of better places to live, eventually finding them in coastal areas — which are now submerged, which is why no similar sites of this antiquity have ever been found. Shellfish would then have become a critical source of food, and the study contends that humans then followed these resources out of Africa, moving along the Indian Ocean coast to the Red Sea, the Middle East, and beyond…

As far as the cold waters of the North Sea, in fact. Fast forward to just a few thousand years ago: the late Mesolithic in northern Europe. In places like Britain and Denmark, humans still have a basically marine diet. Then agriculture comes, either in the form of knowledge or of farmers, and suddenly — the evidence is that the change was very rapid — the eating habits of 150,000 years are gone. That’s gotta hurt. In particular, what did people do about vitamin D, which is plentiful in seafood but in cereals, well, not so much. Vitamin D is made in the skin when it is exposed to sunlight. As Razib points out at Gene Expression, we know that genes for skin pigmentation have been strongly selected. Is it the sudden transition to low vitamin D foods in the Neolithic that accounts for the paleness of northern European skins?

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Two Africas

While browsing the iafrica.com website after reading its features on the potato, I ran across an article about tea-tasting at the Mont Rochelle Hotel in Franschhoek, not far from Cape Town. Which sounds wonderful. But a poignant complement to it was provided by a post I found a little bit later on a blog from the Botswanan village of Nata, which has a line about how tea and bread are served at funerals there. Anyway, Nata Village Blog seems like it’s definitely worth following. Franschhoek and Nata are about 1,600 km apart, as the crow flies.

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Kill and cure

There’s a great article at Common-Place about the Great American Ham. No, not Kevin Bacon. We’re talking how to cure “the thigh of a back leg of a hog, [with its] three large cross braided muscles, now designated the inside round, outside round, and sirloin tip.” It’s down to the “three s method: salt, saltpeter and smoke.” Sugar sometimes features as a fourth s. Fascinating historical stuff, and something of a (welcome) antidote to our incredibly popular mini-pig nibble.

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Perennial wheat a little bit closer

Almost a year ago I blogged about a trial of perennial wheat being planted at Texas A&M University by Dr Charlie Rush. Well, the results are in now, and they’re encouraging. According to a press release, the grazing (they do that with wheat in Texas) was as good as annual wheat, and the seed yield about half. Another part of the study is getting under way, crossing the perennial wheats with regionally adapted varieties to try and produce perennial wheats that are better suited to specific conditions. And more detailed investigation of the perennial wheats will continue.

The really good news, as far as I am concerned, is that Dr Rush is now collaborating with Dr Stan Cox at The Land Institute. The scientists there have been such pioneers in perennial polyculture, I was kind of peeved that the first news from Texas A&M ignored them. It is very heartening to see mainstream scientists recognizing The Land Institute’s contributions and expertise. There’s also apparently been interest in the perennial wheats from what Texas A&M calls the Jon Innes Centre in Norwich, England. ((It is actually the John Innes Centre, with 1.3 million Google hits, versus the five for Jon Innes Centre.)) It is hard to tell what the JIC wants with perennial wheats; the release says something about habitat for wild birds. No doubt all part of the UK’s marvellous biodiversity conservation plan.

And in other wheat news, two rather heavy-duty papers about molecular biology. The first is a review of molecular markers in wheat breeding. ((Landjeva, Svetlana et al. (2007) Molecular markers: actual and potential contributions to wheat genome characterization and breeding. Euphytica, 156: 271-296. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10681-007-9371-0.)) If you’re into this sort of stuff, you don’t need this review. If you aren’t, it gives a reasonable history and summary and might help you to scythe your way through the thickets of jargon, acronyms and abbreviations. My main objection is the claim that “large-scale genome characterization by DNA-fingerprinting has revealed no declining trends in the molecular genetic diversity in wheat as a consequence of modern intensive breeding thus opposing the genetic ‘erosion’ hypothesis”, which takes a very narrow view of the genetic erosion hypothesis indeed.

And coming right along to bolster my belief, a paper showing that synthetic wheats are a valuable source of traits to improve varieties for baking and milling. ((Kunert, Antje et al. (2007) AB-QTL analysis in winter wheat: I. Synthetic hexaploid wheat (T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides — T. tauschii) as a source of favourable alleles for milling and baking quality traits. Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 115: 683-695. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00122-007-0600-7.)) It is much easier to cross modern wheats with synthetic wheats (because they contain the same number of chromosome sets, six) than it is to cross modern wheats with either wild relatives or ancient wheats (which contain four or two sets). Kunert and colleagues crossed two wild species, revealing interesting genetic traits to improve qualities such as the amount of protein and the resistance to sprouting in storage, which can now be bred into modern wheats.

My feeling is that if all the genetic diversity breeders need were present in modern wheats, as Landjeva seems to think, then other scientists would not be spending considerable time and effort to create synthetic wheats from wild relatives in order to use them in breeding programmes.