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...
All posts tagged with plants
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: A 137-year-old botanical experiment
On the subject of long-running experiments in biology, Atlas Obscura has a story about a 137-year-old experiment in the germination of common weeds: “The wor...
Notable: Ancient Australians and baobab dispersal
Notable paper: Rangan H, Bell KL, Baum DA, Fowler R, McConvell P, et al. (2015) New Genetic and Linguistic Analyses Show Ancient Human Influence on Baobab Ev...
Neandertal self-medication
Karen Hardy and colleagues (2013) have a brief paper in a recent issue of Antiquity putting into context their recent finding about possible medicinal plant ...
Tracking the potato pathogen
An increasing number of authors of scientific papers are writing good blog summaries of their work. The really great part is that the authors tend to give ba...
Domestication, plant breeding, and micronutrients
An interesting essay in the New York Times today by Jo Robinson: “Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food”. The theme is that plant domestication selected for...
Tartar control and Neandertal plant use
Dental plaque is a biofilm made up of bacteria adhering to the enamel surface of the teeth. Plaque is soft but over many days can gradually calcify. The hard...
Mailbag: Grasses and bedding
Re: MSA sorghum use and starches adhering to tools non-obvious for seed processing:
Seeds of MSA diet breadth
Julio Mercader reports in a short Science paper that the MSA stone artifacts from Ngalue cave, Mozambique, preserve thousands of grains of sorghum starch, al...
The fishy spaces of the Middle Pleistocene
In Science this week, Nira Alperson-Afil and colleagues report on recent excavations at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel. I saw some of this research presented a...
Kew art
One of my favorite art bloggers, Katherine Tyrell, has an illustrated review of a Kew Gardens exhibition, titled “The Art of Plant Evolution”.
Middle Stone Age bed and breakfast
On occasion, I point out interesting findings from archaeological chemistry and microscopic study of site formation processes. Last month, I pointed to the a...
Neandertals, plants, and fish
I don’t read Spanish well, but I’m going to go ahead and link a news article in a Spanish journal about Neandertal diet and cooking at the Spanish site of El...
Weeds and climate change
On the subject of weeds and biological invasions, touched on in this week’s “Practical Evolution” essay, the NY Times ran a long piece last week about the re...
Weed species (part 1)
This is the first in a series of essays titled, "Practical Evolution." Here are links to the whole series and the series introduction. I've decided to break ...