Free Republic

Turning on a gene found in wheat could boost levels of protein, iron and zinc, scientists have discovered. The gene occurs naturally in wheat, but has largely been silenced during the evolution of domestic varieties. Researchers found evidence that turning it back on could raise levels of the nutrients in wheat grains. Writing in the journal Science, they suggest that new varieties with a fully functioning gene can be created through cross-breeding with wild wheat... The researchers identified a gene called GPC-B1, GPC standing for Grain Protein Content... The UC Davis team is already making such varieties, not by genetic...

Jun. 18, 2006 0:24 | Updated Jun. 18, 2006 10:4511,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period. The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science. It is the...

THE feast of Ireland’s patron saint has always been an occasion for saluting the beautiful land “where the praties grow,” but it’s also a time to look again at the disaster that established around the world the Irish communities that today celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6. In its wake, the Irish left the old country, with more than half a million settling in United States. The famine and the migrations changed Irish and American history, of course, but they drastically changed Britain too. Americans may think of the disease that destroyed Ireland’s potato crops, late...

An Italian doctor claims to have found the first Italian case of death from gluten intolerance in a female skeleton uncovered at an Ancient Roman site. The skeleton was found in the ancient town of Cosa, today's Ansedonia, in southern Tuscany. Giovanni Gasbarrini, a doctor at Rome's Gemelli Hospital, examined bone DNA from the woman, who died in the first century AD at the age of 18-20. Gasbarrini, whose study has been published in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, noted that the young woman's jewelry indicated she came from a wealthy family but her DNA suggested she died of...

Using large-scale gene re-sequencing, Purugganan and a team of researchers traced the origins of domesticated rice as far back as 9,000 years ago to China's Yangtze Valley, according to a May 2 press release from New York University. The tens of thousands of kinds of rice available in the world today are mostly varieties of either japonica or indica, the two major subspecies of Asian rice, Oryza sativa. It had been a subject of scientific debate whether these two subspecies had a common origin, or developed separately in China and India. "The multiple-origin model has gained currency in recent years...

Citrus species are among the most important fruit trees in the world. Citrus has a long history of cultivation, often thought to be more than 4,000 years. Until now, however, the exact genetic origins of cultivated citrus such as sweet orange (Citrus sinensis), lemon (C. limon), and grapefruit (C. paradisi) have been a mystery. A team of researchers from China has published a study in the Journal of the American Society of Horticultural Science that provides genetic evidence of the origins of a variety species of today's cultivated citrus. The research team, led by Zhiqin Zhou from Southwest University, analyzed...

This research has enabled the recording of numerous fleshy fruits such as plums of various types, cherries, peaches, sloes, grapes, apples, figs, quince and medlar and, in a token manner, olives. The overall collection of nuts is interesting, significant being the presence of hazel nuts, acorns, walnuts, pine kernels and, sporadically, beechnuts. As regards cereals, wheat, barley and oats have been identified. Also of particular important are the various seeds of the bottle (or calabash) gourd, a species of water pumpkin, very rarely recorded in archaeological contexts.

When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined. “This broad and consistent pattern holds up when you look at standardized studies of whole skeletons in populations,” says Amanda Mummert, an Emory graduate student in anthropology. Mummert (in photo at right) led the first comprehensive, global review of the literature regarding stature and health during the agriculture transition, to be published by the journal Economics and Human Biology. “Many people have this image of the rise...

Croatia does not have a reputation as a hotbed of ancient agriculture. But new excavations, described January 7 in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, unveil a Mediterranean Sea-hugging strip of southern Croatia as a hub for early farmers who spread their sedentary lifestyle from the Middle East into Europe. Farming villages sprouted swiftly in this coastal region, called Dalmatia, nearly 8,000 years ago, apparently with the arrival of Middle Easterners already adept at growing crops and herding animals, says archaeologist Andrew Moore of Rochester Institute of Technology in New York... Plant cultivation and...

Farming in Europe did not just spread by word-of-mouth, but was introduced by migrants from the ancient Near East, a study suggests.Scientists analysed DNA from the 8,000 year-old remains of early farmers found at an ancient graveyard in Germany. They compared the genetic signatures to those of modern populations and found similarities with the DNA of people living in today's Turkey and Iraq. The study appears in the journal PLoS Biology. Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide in Australia led the team of international researchers from Germany, Russia and Australia. Up until now, many scientists believed that the concept...

Analysis of ancient DNA from skeletons suggests that Europe's first farmers were not the descendants of the people who settled the area after the retreat of the ice sheets. Instead, the early farmers probably migrated into major areas of central and eastern Europe about 7,500 years ago, bringing domesticated plants and animals with them, says Barbara Bramanti from Mainz University in Germany and colleagues. The researchers analyzed DNA from hunter-gatherer and early farmer burials, and compared those to each other and to the DNA of modern Europeans. They conclude that there is little evidence of a direct genetic link between...

WHERE DO FINNS COME FROM? Not long ago, cytogenetic experts stirred up a controversy with their "ground-breaking" findings on the origins of the Finnish and Sami peoples. Cytogenetics is by no means a new tool in bioanthropological research, however. As early as the 1960s and '70s, Finnish researchers made the significant discovery that one quarter of the Finns' genetic stock is Siberian, and three quarters is European in origin. The Samis, however, are of different genetic stock: a mixture of distinctly western, but also eastern elements. If we examine the genetic links between the peoples of Europe, the Samis form...

Deep in Tibet... the explorers came upon the first of the enigmatic creatures. They saw one, and then three of them grazing in the open forest. Soon, to their astonishment, a whole herd of the unusual horses appeared. "They looked completely archaic, like the horses in prehistoric cave paintings," said Michel Peissel, a French ethnologist and the expedition leader. "We thought it was just a freak, then we saw they were all alike." A team of French and British explorers, who have just returned here from a six-week expedition in Tibet, say they believe that they found an ancient breed...

The moment when the hunter-gatherers laid down their spears and began farming around 11,000 years ago is often interpreted as one of the most rapid and significant transitions in human history -- the 'Neolithic Revolution'. By producing and storing food, Homo sapiens both mastered the natural world and took the first significant steps towards thousands of years of runaway technological development. The advent of specialist craftsmen, an increase in fertility and the construction of permanent architecture are just some of the profound changes that followed. Of course, the transition to agriculture was far from rapid. The period around 14,500 years...

Humans come in a rainbow of hues, from dark chocolate browns to nearly translucent whites. This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occuring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. The consensus among scientists has always been that lower levels of vitamin D at higher latitudes — where the sun is less intense — caused the lightening effect when modern humans, who began darker-skinned, first migrated north. But other factors might be at work, a new study suggests. From the varying effects of frostbite...

White Europeans could have evolved as recently as 5,500 years ago, according to research which suggests that the early humans who populated Britain and Scandinavia had dark skins for millenniums. It was only when early humans gave up hunter-gathering and switched to farming about 5,500 years ago that white skin began to be favoured, say the researchers. This is because farmed food was deficient in vitamin D, a vital nutrient. Humans can make this in their skin when exposed to sunlight, but dark skin is much less efficient at it. In places such as northern Europe, where sunlight levels are...

A Tarim Basin mummy photographed circa 1910 Photo: Aurel Stein The door creaked open, and there in the gloom of the newly opened room, perfectly preserved despite the passing of thousands of years, a red-haired mummy with Caucasian features stared back. It was a life-changing moment for archaeologist Professor Victor Mair, and ten years on it still gave him chills. Mair had stumbled upon the recently discovered corpses of a man and his family in a museum in the Chinese city of Ürümqi, but the shock waves of the find would be felt far and wide. The 3000-year-old Cherchen...

A few weeks ago I posted on a paper, Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers.Another one is out in the same vein, Ancient DNA Reveals Lack of Continuity between Neolithic Hunter-Gatherers and Contemporary Scandinavians: The driving force behind the transition from a foraging to a farming lifestyle in prehistoric Europe (Neolithization) has been debated for more than a century...Of particular interest is whether population replacement or cultural exchange was responsible...Scandinavia holds a unique place in this debate, for it maintained one of the last major hunter-gatherer complexes in Neolithic Europe, the Pitted Ware culture...Intriguingly, these late...

In the remote desert highlands of southern Yemen, a team of archaeologists have discovered new evidence of ancient transitions from hunting and herding to irrigation agriculture 5,200 years ago. As part of a larger program of archaeological research, Michael Harrower from the University of Toronto and The Roots of Agriculture in Southern Arabia (RASA) team explored the Wadi Sana watershed documenting 174 ancient irrigation structures, modeled topography and hydrology, and interviewed contemporary camel and goat herders and irrigation farmers. "Agriculture in Yemen appeared relatively late in comparison with other areas of the Middle East, where farming first developed near the...

Contact: Mary Pohl mpohl@mailer.fsu.edu 850-644-8153 Florida State University FSU anthropologist finds earliest evidence of maize farming in Mexico TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought. Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles...