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Dog fight over canine origins

We’ve pointed briefly to recent studies on the origins of the domestic dog, where two schools of thought hold sway. The conventional version offers east Asia — China, more or less — as the centre of dog diversity and, by implication, the place where dogs were first domesticated. An apostate view is that dogs were domesticated in Africa and perhaps in Europe too.

There’s no clear resolution in sight yet, but it looks as if the Chinese dog may be on top. A news report in Science gives details of (and links to) a new and more detailed study from Peter Savolainen and his team:

The data reaffirm a single site for domestication and pinpoint the origin of the domesticated dog to a region south of the Yangtze River, where wolf taming was quite common, Savolainen’s team reports today in Molecular Biology and Evolution. That’s where the largest number of similar groupings of DNA, called haplogroups, is found. As the researchers looked at dogs farther from this region, they saw fewer haplogroups; Europe had only four, for example. “The gene pool we are finding in Europe and Africa are a subset of the South Chinese gene pool,” says Savolainen.

But the African dogs aren’t rolling over yet.

Carles Vilà of the Biology Station of Doñana-CSIC in Seville, Spain … points out that other genetic studies suggest dogs date back at least 20,000 years and that archaeological remains of dogs in Europe are almost as old. … “I’m not convinced by the results,” he says, “and I do not think this is the last that we will hear about the time and place of the domestication of dogs.”

That seems certain. Back in the days before DNA a multiple-origins theory was all the rage, but then, it was for H. sapiens too.

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Talking about prairie restoration

“Not long ago, it was assumed that once a prairie was plowed up for row crop agriculture, there was no way to get the plant and animal species back again,” said Chris Helzer of The Nature Conservancy. “But now we’ve got the technology and experience to successfully harvest and plant seeds from hundreds of plant species. So in cases where it makes sense to do that kind of restoration, we can re-establish that diverse plant community.”

And that, as we’ve seen, includes a whole bunch of crop wild relatives. Wonder if the folks talking about this in Aurora, NE will give them their due. In fact, I wonder if restoration ecologists in general give any sort of special consideration to CWRs in their work. If you know, tell us.

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Good news from Zimbabwe?

“I’m looking for maduni, my son. This millet variety was grown for ages by our ancestors, but it’s gone,” she says. “We grew it in our fields when we were young. We liked it because it had a good taste unlike some of the new varieties we have now.”

Long piece by Sifelano Tsiko in the Zimbabwe Herald about the search for forgotten varieties of traditional crops and wild species.

“If humanity mourns the loss of wild plants, we should really worry about the extinction of cultivated ones. These plants sustain our lives,” one renowned agricultural development activist once remarked.

I wonder who that was?

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What’s yellow, nutritious and doesn’t rot?

If you answered PPD-free carotene-rich cassava roots, then you obviously got to the CIAT blog before we did. There’s a great story about the kind of serendipitous result that makes scientific research so exciting. CIAT has been developing a yellow cassava, which they call an “egg-yolk” variety, in the hope that the extra carotenes would help to rectify the vitamin A deficiencies that plague so many poor people. Roots were sent off for analysis (the results are very promising) but some of those roots were forgotten in a store-room for two months.

They should have been “totally spoiled and rotten,” because cassava roots are prone to something called post-harvest physiological degradation (PPD) that destroys them within a couple of days of harvest. It seems that the anti-oxidant activity of the carotenes — which had faded away in the stored specimens — had somehow protected them from PPD.

This is a huge breakthough for cassava breeders, growers and processors. Read more at CIAT.

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Indigenous food systems documented

FAO has a book out called Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems, published with the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment (CINE). There’s an informative interview with Barbara Burlingame, senior nutrition officer at FAO and coordinator for the book, on the FAO InTouch website. Unfortunately, this is only available internally at FAO, for reasons which elude me. Here’s a few of the interesting things Dr Burlingame had to say.

We wanted to showcase the many dimensions of these traditional food resources, breaking them down by nutrition, health, culture and environmental sustainability. So much knowledge of early cultures is contained within traditional foods and their cultivation, and they have a direct impact on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health of indigenous communities. Indigenous foods can have important nutritional benefits, for example. For instance plant foods are generally viewed as good sources of carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. These foods also provide important economic benefits, such as helping create self-sufficient communities and establishing a strong foundation of food security.
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We believe the information can be a help to those in nutrition, agriculture, environmental and health education, and science, including policymakers. Nutritionists can use the information to try and correct imbalances in certain regions. For example, we discovered in research that the Pohnpei district community in the Federated States of Micronesia was severely deficient in vitamin A, despite the fact that a species of banana rich in vitamin A beta-carotenes was indigenous to the region. Once we determined the nutritional composition of the banana, we were able to educate the people about its benefit and encourage them to eat the local fruit, which helped reverse the deficiency.
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Yes, another book is under way that focuses more on nutrition and public health. It will look at policy dimensions, stemming the tide of obesity in indigenous peoples, the value of indigenous weaning foods for babies, and a ‘go local’ campaign in Micronesia encouraging communities to eat local food items. We will also continue in our efforts in integrating elements of biodiversity into all aspects of nutrition.

“Go Local” of course refers to the campaign to promote traditional foods in the Pacific spearheaded by Lois Englberger and her colleagues at the Island Food Community of Pohnpei, who have appeared frequently on these pages. It’s great to see my old friends from the Pacific getting this kind of international exposure for their efforts, and making a difference beyond their immediate region.

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