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Cattle domestication

I was going to write about some recent papers on the domestication of cattle myself, but things got a bit hectic and I didn’t find time. I did, however, find Razib’s post at Gene Expression, and I commend it to you. Of course there’s a lot in there about the genes for milk production, and some worrying nonsense about using genome information to breed better cattle or, to put it another way “accelerating livestock genetic improvement for milk and meat production”. Breeders making use of super-sires and super-ovulating cows have already done a pretty good job of reducing the diversity of extant cattle, and I for one am not convinced by the need for ever more efficient use-once-then-dispose-of milk machines. But I haven’t read the papers, so I can’t comment further. I am intrigued, however, by this statement, quoted by Razib:

Domestication and artificial selection appear to have left detectable signatures of selection within the cattle genome, yet the current levels of diversity within breeds are at least as great as exists within humans.

If we’re not suffering from having passed through genetic narrows, maybe cattle aren’t either. Maybe they’re just suffering.

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A little little barley goes a long way

Like I say, not a day goes by. Yesterday, ramie. Today, little barley. As in:

They likely ate sunflower, marsh elder, two types of chenopod—a family that includes spinach and beets—and possibly squash and little barley, according to the findings. The people also grew bottle gourd to make into containers.

That would be the Riverton people living three thousand years ago along the Wabash River in present-day Illinois.

The Riverton crops may have “added to what was [already] a successful life” for the ancient Americans, said Brian Redmond, curator and head of archaeology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

Yes, because…

…[b]efore they began farming, the Riverton people lived among bountiful river valleys and lakes, apparently eating a healthy and diverse diet of nuts, white-tailed deer, fish, and shellfish, the study says.

So the Riverton people were not reacting to some environmental stress as a matter of survival when they became agriculturalists, but rather “engaging in a bit of gastronomic innovation.” Good for them.

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Featured: Uses of nettels

Christopher Taylor reminds us of the uses of other Urticaceae:

One thing I discovered a while ago when looking up ramie was that nettles themselves (Urtica) contain fibre that can be used in weaving. Nettle fibre isn’t used so much currently because, to be honest, it’s kind of rubbish, but it did have a usage spike in Britain during World War II when better-quality materials such as linen were in short supply.

The multifarious uses of nettles, as coincidence would have it, Jeremy nibbled about only a few days ago.

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Ramie ruminations

Not a day passes that I don’t utter an imprecation — as Julian Simon Barnes did in print a few days back — at agrobiodiversity. Take yesterday. There’s a big meeting going on this week at FAO, and they’ve set up a series of stands in the atrium. Most of them are pretty boring, just piles of publications and the odd poster, but the one put up by the people behind the International Year of Natural Fibres is very nice indeed.

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It has examples of handicrafts and other products made from a whole lot of different fibres, from abaca to muskox. Including ramie. And that’s when I cursed the neverending-ness of biodiversity. For what, pray, is ramie? I know abaca and muskox, but I’d never heard of ramie.

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Well, it turns out to be Boehmeria nivea, a shrub in the nettle family widely cultivated in East Asia since antiquity for its bark, which is used to make fabrics. The IYNF website has a page about it. The Korean national costume (the hanbok) is made of ramie cloth, so we’re not talking about a minor, obscure, criminally underused plant here. Bloody agrobiodiversity indeed. I hate you.