Cultivation is not the same as domestication. Domestication involves changes that do the plant no good in the wild, but that make it more useful to the people who cultivate it. Seeds that don’t disperse, for example, and that aren’t all that well protected from pests and diseases. In this episode,...
A single cell of modern bread wheat contains more than five times the DNA of a human cell, in a much more complicated arrangement. As a result, it has taken a fair old while to decode wheat’s genome. Having done so, though, the DNA confirms what plant scientists have long suspected; bread wheat is...
Back in 2018, archaeologists celebrated the oldest crumbs of burnt toast in the world. But have you stopped to wonder how they found those crumbs? The bread they came from was a fine, mixed grain loaf that might well have been a special dish at a feast. It is even possible that bread was the fir...
When did people start to eat wheat? The date keeps getting pushed back, and is now around 35,000 to 45,000 years ago. That is long before the dawn of intentional agriculture. How do we know? Because a man who died in a cave hadn’t cleaned his teeth, and stuck in the tartar were grains of boiled st...
Over on Mastodon, I noted that Juhis, whom I follow, was getting fired up about the start of Blaugust. I had no idea what that was about, so had a quick look and discovered that it was a month-long celebration of blogging, the goal being to write a post a day for the whole of August. Ha! I thought, I’ve already done the exact same thing, for the Dog Days of Podcasting, which is still going strong, although I’m not doing it this year.
