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Early agriculture in the Old and New Worlds

Last week saw the publication of a couple of papers about early agriculture in two very different regions which will probably have people talking for quite a while. From Snir et al. 1 came a study of pre-Neolithic cultivation in the Near East. And from the other side of the world, there was the latest in the controversy over the extent of Amazonian agriculture from Clement et al. 2.

Yes, I did say pre-Neolithic. The key finding of the archaeological work described by the first paper is that 23,000 years ago, or over 11 millennia before the putative start of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, hunter-gatherers along the Sea of Galilee in what is now Israel maintained little — and, crucially, weedy — fields of cereals. The archaeobotanists found remains of both the weeds and the cereals at a site called Ohalo II, as well as of sickles, and the cereals were not entirely “wild”, as the key domestication indicator of a non-brittle rachis was much more common than it should have been. To see what this means, have a look at this diagram from a fairly recent paper on agricultural origins in the region. 3

diagram

Those “first phenotypic indications of domestication”, dated at 12,500 years ago, need to be pushed quite a bit leftwards on that timeline now, off the edge in fact. A non-shattering rachis, it seems, was quite a quick trick for wild grasses to learn. But the process by which they acquired all the other traits that made them “domesticated” was very protracted and stop-start.

Zoom over to Amazonia, and the transition to farming took place much later, probably around 4,000 years ago, according to the other paper published last week. But it was just as significant as in the much better-known “cradle of agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent, with perhaps 80 species showing evidence of some domestication. The difference, of course, is that Amazonian agriculture was based on trees, rather than annual grasses and legumes.

amazon clement

According to the authors, parts of the Amazon basin, in particular those now showing evidence of earthworks and dark, anthropogenic soils, were just as much managed landscapes by the time of European contact as the places those Europeans came from. But compare our collections of crop diversity from the Amazon basin (courtesy of Genesys, which admittedly does not yet include Brazilian genebanks)…

amazon

with what we have from the Near East…

fertile crescent

If we want to know more about how the domestication process and transition to agriculture differed in the Amazon and the Fertile Crescent, there’s a whole lot of exploration still to do.

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How do you do biofortification?

Well…

First, plant breeders screen thousands of different types of crop seed stored in global seed banks to discover varieties with naturally higher amounts of micronutrients.

Nicely, and all too rarely, said.

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Featured: Melons

Nate Kleinman of Experimental Farm Network is not at all upset we reprinted his melon post from Facebook:

Thanks for posting this. We’re clearly excited about these interesting melons. At the end of the season we plan to compile information on everything we grew this year and last to report back to the USDA. This not only helps their science, but also helps them justify their budgets in the inevitable DC budget fights ahead. It’s important for people who use this unique and critically important resource (the National Plant Germplasm System) to lay out and explain what’s so special about it. These melons are just the tip of the iceberg.

Wish all genebank users were so obliging.

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From the Maldives to New Jersey

melonThis photo accompanies a Facebook post on the page of the Experimental Farm Network, an initiative “dedicated to facilitating participatory plant breeding and other collaborative agricultural projects.” Now, I don’t understand Facebook enough to know who will actually be able to see the post, so I’ll reproduce it here:

Our first two “Hithadhoo Melons” from Hithadhoo, Laamu atoll, in the Maldives! These two very different looking melons came from the same packet of seeds we received through the USDA (PI 536482). We picked them yesterday because they were starting to split, likely due to the immense rain of last week, followed by the intense heat of this week here in NJ.

The USDA collected this in 1986, but it was listed as a cucumber until 1999 when they correctly re-id’d it as a melon. When the fruit are still small, they do look and taste very much like cucumbers. We’re letting these sit for a bit to continue ripening before we crack them open to see what they’re like inside. We plan to reach out to folks in the Maldives to learn what they call this melon, what they use it for, how they grow it, etc. Hithadhoo is one of the largest islands in the archipelago.

After putting off these two early on, plus a couple other large fruit still on the vines, the plants are suddenly putting off tons of female flowers, meaning many more fruit are on the way. It seems likely each plant could produce a dozen or more full-size melons before the season is through. Hand-pollination has been relatively easy with this one too, even in the afternoon (some cucurbits are only fertile in the morning). This one definitely seems like a winner.

Just one more reason why it’s a shame the Maldives are likely to slip beneath the waves before this century is through.

What intrigues me here is whether the North Central Regional PI Station at Ames, Iowa, which is where PI 536482 is conserved, know about this. Because I bet they’d be really interested to know all about how those Maldivian melons are doing in New Jersey.

There must be a way to monitor the internet for references to PI numbers. Right? Some clever way of setting up a Google Alert that returns only instances of the string “PI” followed by numbers (perhaps with a space in front), perhaps?