Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Whatever you think about the link between the spread of languages and that of farming — and the correspondence between the two postulated by Bellwood is controversial — there is no denying the similarities between a map of language diversity in a recent paper
Our regular readers 1 will know that there’s been a regular deluge — windfall? — of apple stories in the past few months, in particular about the imminent demise of the British orchard. The latest surfaced today. In such stories, aspersions are often cast on the qualities of such commercial favourites as the Granny Smith. 2 I guess the unspoken implication is that this and similarly successful varieties are the evil spawn of some sinister multinational, and probably contain, to boot, genes cruelly extracted from some Arctic fish without its prior or informed consent and unnaturally inserted into the pristine apple genome by soulless pointy-headed boffins with Nazi sympathies.
Nothing could be further from the truth, it turns out, at least in the case of the Granny Smith, which was, in fact, spotted as a seedling and first grown by Maria Ann Smith on her farm in Ryde, New South Wales around 1868. 3 It started life as the kind of backyard variety that would later become known as a heirloom. So, I ask myself, what obscure pome, currently languishing in some forgotten British orchard, soon to be rescued by the imminent influx of National Trust money, will eventually knock old Granny from her pedestal? And when will we be complaining about that one?
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.
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.
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.