Origin of Agriculture
Category archives for Origin of Agriculture
Seven Thousand Year Old African Dairy
Posted by Greg Laden on June 21, 2012 
Pastoralism is the practice of keeping and herding animals such as cattle, goats and sheep, and using the products they produce, including meat, hide, bone, horn and of course, dairy. In the old days, armchair archaeologists thought that pastoralism would have been a phase of cultural adaptation following hunting and gathering and preceding horticulture (the…
A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2012 Over the last few weeks I’ve run into a few misconceptions about tobacco, as well as some interesting news, so I thought I’d share. If you already know some of this, forgive me, not everyone else does. First, tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, is a member of the Solanaceae family of plants, which from a human perspective…
The Origin of Wine
Posted by Greg Laden on July 27, 2011 With Julia spending the summer and most of the fall in The Republic of Georgia, I’ve been thinking about various political and historical aspects of that country, and one of the things that is claimed to be true is that wine was first invented there. Recently, someone asked me (always ask the archaeologist esoteric stuff…
Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea…
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
Primitive Cultures are Simple, Civilization is Complex (A falsehood) III
Posted by Greg Laden on September 23, 2009 This is the third of three parts of this particular falsehood. (Here is the previous part)
Explaining the Spread of Agriculture into Europe
Posted by Greg Laden on August 31, 2009 The practice of growing food and keeping livestock was invented numerous times throughout the world. One ‘center’ of agriculture is said to be the Middle East. Despite the fact that calling the Middle East a “center” in this context is a gross oversimplification, it is true that agriculture was practiced in Anatolia and the Levant…
Reading Human Nature
Posted by Greg Laden on July 26, 2009 “Human nature” is an interesting topic. People will argue over the definition of human nature, but regardless of what people think or say, it is reasonable to assume that all humans share a psychological and developmental framework to the extent that any two people raised in the same background will ‘turn out’ similar with respect…
Unhealthy Diet in Ancient Near East
Posted by Greg Laden on January 16, 2009 This is an old story being resurrected wiht new data: Biblical diet ‘unhealthy’ A new study into the diet of ancient Israel has revealed that far from being ‘the land of milk and honey’, its inhabitants suffered from the lack of a balanced diet.
The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2009 One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason…
When the corn weevil knocks, we are all doomed.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2008 Maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais [usda] … or the corn rust or the corn root cutter or whatever pathogen that comes along that cannot be fought off with a cleverly concocted combination of chemicals. This is because all we eat is corn, or so it seems. In a paper just published in PNAS, scientists use stable…
Research on The Origins of Maize (Corn)
Posted by Greg Laden on October 25, 2008 Corn (maize) was domesticated in the earlier part of the Holocene in Mexico from a wild plant called teosinte. Subsequent to the discovery of this area of origin by MacNeish, a great deal of research has gone on to track the spread of maize across the New World, its diversification, its effects on Native American…
Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting
Posted by Greg Laden on October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like…
The Origins of the Evil Eye and Horticultural Fertility Cults?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 13, 2008 It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature … the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human…
Berry Go Round #3
Posted by Greg Laden on March 26, 2008 Welcome to Berry Go Round #3, the blog carnival deicated to all things botanical. The previous installment, Berry Go Round #2, is located here, at Further Thoughts. If you would like to submit an item to the next Berry Go Round, you may use this handy submission form. The Berry Go Round Home Page is…
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2008 There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.” From the abstract of this paper: … We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital…
The Origin of the Chicken
Posted by Greg Laden on February 29, 2008 Where and when were chickens domesticated? From whence the humble chicken? Gallus gallus is a domesticated chicken-like bird (thus, the name “chicken”) that originates in southeast Asia. Ever since Darwin we’ve known that the chicken originated in southeast Asia, although the exact details of which one or more of several possible jungle fowls is the…
Darwin and the Voyage: 05 ~ South America on Five Dollars a Day
Posted by Greg Laden on February 9, 2008 What do you eat when you are traveling the world in search of truth about the natural world? Most of the time Darwin ate pretty well…
The Great Potato Origins Debate May be Settled
Posted by Greg Laden on February 2, 2008 Solanum tuberosum, is an American cultivar related to the tomato and the eggplant (Remarkably, they are all in the same genus, but rarely to all three appear in the same dish). Potatoes, the lovely underground storage organ (USO) without which we would not have French Fries, or dipping chips to eat during the Super Bowl,…
, which is now available for the 
