How mice became house mice
A new paper from Thomas Cucchi and coworkers in Scientific Reports probes the early history of the house mouse: “Tracking the Near Eastern origins and Europe...
All posts tagged with agriculture
‘Where my house is, those trees were once growing’
The New York Times reports on a revival of the agricultural variety: “Finding Lost Apples and Reviving a Beloved Cider”.
The dawn of bread
Archaeologists working at Shubayqa 1, a site in northeastern Jordan, found tiny fragments of an ancient unleavened bread as they were excavating a hearth. Th...
Link: Sicilian wine from the Copper Age retrieved from deep in geothermal caves
The Conversation has a nice article by Davide Tanasi reviewing recent work uncovering historic secrets locked away by sulfuric cave fumes in Sicily: “Prehist...
Link: Finding the lost rice of the American South
The New York Times has a fascinating story about a lost strain of rice that once was widely grown by slaves and freedmen in the South: “Finding a Lost Strain...
A genomic look at hybridization in citrus fruits
I just love this article about hybridization and the origins of different varieties of citrus fruits: “Genomics of the origin and evolution of Citrus”.
Link: Searching for knotweed and other early North American domesticates
Annalee Newitz has written an article about Natalie Mueller’s search for the ancient food crops of North America: “Hunting for the ancient lost farms of Nort...
Link: Peanut origins
Peanuts have an interesting origin: “Modern Peanut’s Wild Cousin, Thought Extinct, Found in Andes”.
Notable: Plant use in Neolithic Nubia
Notable paper: Madella M, García-Granero JJ, Out WA, Ryan P, Usai D (2014) Microbotanical Evidence of Domestic Cereals in Africa 7000 Years Ago. PLoS ONE 9(1...
My article in Scientific American
The current issue of Scientific American is specially devoted to human evolution. There are great articles by Kate Wong, Ian Tattersall, Frans de Waal, Berna...
Pointing to entomophagy
Julie Lesnik is a biological anthropologist who has done a lot of research on insect consumption, by ancient hominins, living humans and living non-human pri...
Genetics of smell and population history
I want to point to a recent paper by Jeremy McRae and colleagues McRae:2013, which identifies previously-unknown genetic associations with smell sensitivity ...
Heart disease among the ancients
Mummy in the Louvre, photo by Jose and Roxanne (creative commons)
Mailbag: The Eemian: what gives?
I wandered into your site after searching for Eemian and human evolution.
Spurring the growth of cities
Science this week has a news feature by Andrew Lawler on excavations in southern Mesopotamia looking into what may be the earliest urban developments: “Uncov...
Mailbag: Spuds and mutts
Re: “How widespread is Denisovan ancestry today?” and “Potato sack race”:
Alfred Crosby interviewed
Last week I linked to an article about the dispersal of the potato (“How the Potato Changed the World”). Smithsonian also has an interview with Alfred Crosby...
Potato sack race
Smithsonian magazine has a very nice article by Charles C. Mann, “How the Potato Changed the World”, focusing on the effects of the Columbian exchange on Eur...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Copy number variation in 1000 Genomes
When I wrote earlier in the week about the 1000 Genomes Project results, I mentioned that a second paper was being published in Science. That paper, by Peter...
Mailbag: What my ancestors ate?
Regarding the “caveman” trend:
Norman Borlaug
Yesterday, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died. This AP story reviews his life and accomplishments. Without question, Borlau...
Early iron in Africa
The dawn of ironworking in Africa is a hot anthropological topic. My own interests in demographic growth and dispersals depends very closely on the chronolog...
Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralism
Sharon Begley covers a recent paper by Joanna Mountain on Y chromosome migrations and African pastoralists:
The future of genetics is corny
Elizabeth Pennisi's story about maize genomics is a good reminder for why biology will continue to grow in importance toward our understanding of human hist...
Why human evolution accelerated
n. b. This is a story about my work on recent human evolution, describing some of the main results and how the work came about. The story refers to my paper ...
So, it's dog corn next.
Amy Harmon explains some dog genetics in the NY Times today, in an article focused on whippets. The problem is that undesirable characteristics of some bree...
Global biopharming
Planting time has arrived in most of the country -- even here in zone 4 -- so you may be reading those seed packets carefully. This paragraph may catch your...
Notes on "Darwinian agriculture"
R. Ford Denison's blog, "This Week in Evolution," has become a very interesting read since he began a couple of months ago. Denison recently attended a symp...
Plant drug introgression
This is a nice little article in the times by "collaborative problem solving" director Denise Caruso A NEW generation of genetically engineered crops that p...
Genetics versus energy costs
Either this continues today's Kansas theme, or this week's genetics theme. In either case, it's nice to see some attention to agricultural genetics and its ...
Grass on the run
Genetically engineered creeping bentgrass has been found growing miles from a test plot where it was planted two years ago, according to a NY Times story:
Breastfeeding via rice
On the topic of biotechnology, this AP article describes Ventria Bioscience's field tests of rice altered with a human gene:
Frankencotton on the roll
Now, I hadn't considered this:
Better meat through science
Paul Elias of the AP reports on how geneticists are trying to make tastier hogs: