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The spread of agriculture into Europe

You may recall a post a few days back on how domestic pig keeping spread into Europe. Well, Razib over at Gene Expression, a genetics blog, has a post today which includes a map of the spread of agriculture north and west from the Middle East. He points out that current thinking is that either the practice of agriculture did the spreading (cultural diffusion), or people themselves (demic diffusion) — or both. Both was what the pig work implied, of course. Human genetic studies suggest that Neolithic people have made a fairly low (maybe 20%) contribution to European ancestry, and Razib summarizes the current debate about whether that therefore refutes the hypothesis that movement of people was involved in the spread of agriculture, as well as that of ideas. Bottom line: it probably doesn’t.

He also links to a recent paper that calculates a figure for the rate of movement ((Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe. Pinhasi R, Fort J, Ammerman AJ. 2005. PLoS Biology Vol. 3, No. 12. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030410)): 1 km/year, give or take. That was arrived at by interpolating radiocarbon dates of Neolithic archaeological sites across Europe, and it fits very well with the results of models using human genetic data. ((As far as I’m aware, however, nobody’s done anything similar with crops.)) An interesting way to think about that speed of movement is that it is roughly a one-day walk per generation.

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Historical food information

Weird how just a couple of days after I blogged about current African foodways, The Lubin Files at FAO points me to a wonderful website about the past eating habits of various East African countries. This was put together by Verena Raschke, who at the time was completing a PhD jointly at University of Vienna (Austria) and Monash University (Australia).

[Her] project is based on a precious and unique collection of literature and data from East Africa from the 1930s to the 1960s.

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These unpublished data have been stored at the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food Location Karlsruhe (Germany) for the last 30 years, after the Max Planck Nutrition Research Unit in Tanzania (East Africa) was shut down in the late1970s.

The material is called the Oltersdorf Collection, and it is a veritable treasure trove of historical information on crops, food and nutrition.

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Home is where you make it

Professor Roy Ellen, the project director, said: “This project aims to better understand the levels of agrobiodiversity found in home gardens – that is those gardens intimately linked to individual households. For example, we want to know where seed and other plant material comes from, whether it is purchased or obtained informally, who gives and receives it; who receives vegetable produce, and the economic scale of such exchanges. We wish to learn how people learn to become good home gardeners. Whilst biological diversity in itself is important, so are the skills and knowledge that maintain it.”

If you were a reasonably active member of this community and you read the above quotation you might just possibly think, “Ah. Another project to explore the value of agricultural biodiversity and the social networks that support it in some far-flung corner of the developing world. Nepal, maybe, or Burkina Faso.”

But you would be wrong. For the quote comes from an announcement of a project to study home gardens in that most English of settings, Kent. ((I’m giving it more space than Luigi’s original nibble, because I think it is worth it.)) This is exactly the sort of thing I think is sorely needed to forge links among people worldwide. I’ve not been able to find out that much more about the project, although it seems that at least some people at the University of Kent are admirably qualified. And both the Eden Project and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, “will help with the dissemination of the project output”. I hope that means that they will draw the connections to home gardeners everywhere.

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African food blogging

Emeka Okafor over at Timbuktu Chronicles points to a blog that sounds really fascinating: BetumiBlog. Betumi is the African Culinary Network. It “connects anyone who delights in African cuisine, foodways, and food history.” BetumiBlog is run by Fran Osseo-Asare, who is clearly incredibly knowledgeable and enthusiastic about African food and cooking. She has contributed a chapter on Food and Foodways to the Sub-Saharan Africa volume of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture ((Edited by Dennis Hickey, with Gary Hoppenstand the general editor of the series.)). That includes a very useful table summarizing the many different ways Africans prepare their starchy staples. My personal score is nine.