The history of food

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Robyn Williams: Good evening, I'm Robyn Williams with In Conversation.

And this is Sting.
Music: Fields of Gold
Robyn Williams: Fields of Gold - golden barley, wonderful imagery and it
would be a bit harsh to call those fields expanses of monoculture which have
brought people to a point of global domination that could put nature in
jeopardy.
Whatever you think of those fields of god, there's no doubt we wouldn't be
here, living like this without them. Just a few grasses changed the world. And
it happened just a handful of years ago, as Jared Diamond explains.

Jared Diamond:Here's the story on the agricultural expansions.13,000

years ago all human populations everywhere around the world were hunter-
gatherers gaining their living not by growing food but by gathering and
hunting wild plants and wild animals. Hunter-gatherer populations for the
most part are relatively mobile or semi-nomadic because they move seasonally
to follow the seasonally shifting food supply. That means that hunter-
gatherers also live at low population densities, typically 1 person per square
kilometre or less. Partly that's because most of the wild plants and animals out
there are inedible to us humans; there's just not that much food for humans
out there in the far Australian desert. And in addition, because hunter-
gatherers shift camp every few weeks or every few months the woman has to
carry her baby with her until the baby is old enough that it can walk fast
enough to keep up with the adults - that's about the age of 4. And so hunter-
gatherer societies space out their children in various ways to intervals of 4
years. That long birth interval and the low density of edible food result in the
low population densities of hunter-gatherers.
Hunter-gatherers also have rather little in the way of material possessions. If
you're going to shift camp every few weeks the last thing you want is lots of big
pots and a printing press or an iron forge. In addition, because all able bodied
adults are involved in the task of gathering or hunting food, hunter-gatherers
don't accumulate surpluses of storable food that can be used feed people who
will devote all their time to figuring out how to smelt iron and devise bows and
arrows and atomic bombs and write the B minor Mass. So, for those two
reasons hunter-gatherers have rather simple technology, including no metal
tools.
Robyn Williams: Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA, author of Guns,
Germs and Steel, as well as Collapse, talking a while ago here in Australia. Yes,
we did it, harnessed that natural gift, but it's worth remembering how very few
plants and animals there were globally, which we could turn into farm
produce. Only one native plant, here in Australia, for instance, has been
exploited to any great extent - the macadamia nut. Jared Diamond.
Jared Diamond: It turns out even more surprisingly that the vast majority
of wild plant species cannot be domesticated. That's especially surprising
because there is something like 200,000 species of higher plants, tens of
thousands of species even in Australia. So why didn't native Australians,
Aboriginal Australians go out a domesticate some of these tens of thousands of
plant species? Again, the vast majority of wild plants disqualify for one reason
or another as being suitable domesticates and the few suitable domesticates
that were left were concentrated in certain parts of the world.
For example, consider the large-seeded cereals or grasses that provide more
than half the calories of people today. The large seeded cereals like wheat,
barley and rice and corn. Around the world there were only 56 wild species of
these large seeded cereals, most live in soak zones with Mediterranean
climates and the great majority of them lived in the eastern Mediterranean. 32
out of the world's 56 large-seeded wild cereals are in the eastern
Mediterranean and Australia only has one such species and California and
Chile only one or two species. So of course people of the eastern
Mediterranean had an enormous head start on plant domestication; they had
around them more species of valuable wild plants. The result of all this is that
plant and animal domestication began in that part of the world that had the
most wild plants and animals lending themselves to domestication, namely in
the area called the fertile crescent of the eastern Mediterranean, that area that
extends from modern Iran and Iraq, from Syria to south eastern Turkey, Syria,
Lebanon; that's where grew the wild ancestors of wheat and barley and peas
and sheep and goats. Around 850 BC hunter-gatherers of the fertile crescent
assembled a package of 8 valuable crops providing them with carbohydrate
and protein, fat and fibre and they also assembled a package of 4 valuable
domestic animals - cows, sheep, goat, pig and later horses, that provided them
with meat and hides and leather and milk and traction.
Soon after the origins of agriculture in the fertile crescent 8500 BC or maybe
equally early, food production arose independently in China with the
domestication of different plants and animals; millets, rice, pigs
independently, chickens and water buffalo and later food production
developed independently in maybe as many as 7 other areas, the Highlands of
New Guinea, Mexico, the Andes, the south eastern United States, Ethiopia,
Africa's, Sahel zone and tropical West Africa. But those 9 places that I've just
named are the only places where agriculture might have arisen independently.
Agriculture never did and never could arise independently in Australia,
California, South Africa, Europe, the Indian sub continent etc. etc.
Robyn Williams: Jared Diamond, the geographer and physiologist from Los
Angeles, speaking in Australia. All of which brings me to my conversational
guest tonight. He's Martin Jones, professor of archaeology at Cambridge in
England, who's been tracing the evidence for those fields of barley, and wheat
and millet. And now he's got not only artefacts and fossils, but genetics and
botany to provide clues about where the grass revolution came from.
Martin Jones: Well wheat is the major food source of the human species
today and for that reason alone there's an army of geneticists taking apart the
genome with a fine tooth comb, and we archaeologists are just sitting on the
sidelines there exploiting this mass of information, because in that genetic
information is a lot of historical information about the plant we want to use.
Robyn Williams: Has it changed much, I mean you've got a number of
species presumably going way back, you started with quite a few and you're
left with one or two?
Martin Jones: Today there are something like four or five species of wheat.
But if you look at the wheat in the fields today it doesn't look anything like a
grass. Its ancestor looked like a common garden grass that you find by the
wayside. This thing has massive seeds and very floppy chaff, it doesn't look
like a proper plant and indeed it wouldn't survive many years in the wild
because we've bred it to just suit our purposes; kind of like comparing an Irish
wolfhound to a French poodle; the wheat we eat is the French poodle, we've
just mucked around with it till it suits our needs but it wouldn't last long in the
wild.
Robyn Williams: It's a wonderful analogy but where do you look for your
ancient DNA then, and how old is it?
Martin Jones: We look in various places: in archaeological sites we can find
them at the bottom of underground storage pits, for example, or we can find
them in the refuse pits around houses; all over the place. If people eat a lot of
cereals they leave a small amount of it all over the place and so we can find
grains of wheat that are anywhere between 1000 and 10,500 years old.
Robyn Williams: So you actually go around England, around Asia, around
Europe?
Martin Jones: The general model at the moment is that wheat was first
farmed in south west Asia, the area is sometimes called the Fertile Crescent, a
general region that includes modern Palestine, Israel, Syria, Iran - that's where
we find the earliest sites with people eating wheat. And what we see as
happening is that wheat's spread out over the last 10,000 years in all
directions across Europe, down the Nile Valley and across into Asia. And what
we want to use genetic variation of wheat to find out is to try and track those
pathways out of the Fertile Crescent across Europe.
Robyn Williams: And see it changes as it goes. Of course the crescent is not
that much fertile now, it must have been quite different 10,000 years ago.
Martin Jones: That's absolutely right and some of the archaeological sites
you find in the Fertile Crescent bear witness to that change. I think the site
now, in my mind, that's ten or eleven thousand years old, a simple farmstead
of which only half survives and the other half is sliced through and there's a
sheer ravine, which has been cut through. So once that was a fertile landscape,
then desert formation happens, and ravines got cut and you can just see in the
landscape today, particularly where there are old archaeological sites that river
courses have changed, certainly vegetation has changed and we can see that
from other forms of plant remains. It's been a part of the world where the
environment fluctuates a lot.
But also the environment has fluctuated in other parts of the world and this
has been very significant for understanding how this plant from southwest
Asia spread far across Europe and in other places.

Robyn Williams: Well as you say an unforgiving environment, so how well

does the DNA survive so that you can examine it?
Martin Jones: It starts breaking up after a very few years. A seed is designed
to store DNA very well but even the seeds that we buy in the shop after ten
years or less, less of them will germinate and that's because the DNA has
broken down. So literally after a few years the DNA starts breaking down into
small pieces, we can still get information from those small pieces and they just
get smaller and smaller over time, and when you go back 8,000 or 10,000
years, the whole genome may be in millions of fragments, or even hundreds of
millions of fragments, and each fragment will never have enough information,
but we can start building historical pictures from it.
Robyn Williams: You put it together almost like you put a skeleton together.
Martin Jones: Absolutely, or a jigsaw puzzle. You know, if you think of DNA
as a jigsaw puzzle, what's happened to ancient DNA is the whole jigsaw
puzzle's been left on a compost heap along with a box top and what we found
is one or two grotty bits. But you know they may have a bit of information on
them so we can use that to piece it together. But yes, a lot has happened to
make it difficult to look at. And of course we home in on particular bits of
genetic information that stand up to the ravages of time extremely well.
Robyn Williams: Aren't you finding the remains of what's really a wild type
that's still out there growing on the scrubland?
Martin Jones: You can find the wild type on certain hills scattered around in
the near east and it's an interesting point about hills, because wherever you've
got flat land it can be flowered today, the chances are you won't find anything
ancestral, or you won't even find old varieties. You know the history of
agriculture, particularly in the last 100 years is anything that you can get
tractor on, you've lost it. So hills are very important. Hills in the Fertile
Crescent may have a few stands of those wild forms and also hills and
mountains all around the world may have ancient breeds and varieties of
cultivated wheat that are also tremendously useful in piecing together a
picture of how crops are spread.
Robyn Williams: What about barley, where did that come from?
Martin Jones: Barley's very interesting because barley also came from a very
similar area to wheat, we think, but we know less about precisely where it
started. Somewhere in southwest Asia but the story may change there. The
interesting thing about barley is that it hasn't become as important as wheat,
we grow and consume less barley than wheat but it got everywhere in the
world. By late prehistory they were growing barley in the Arctic Circle in the
Lofoten islands off Scandinavia.
You mentioned earlier about ecology changing and one of the fascinating
things in understanding how a cereal can do that, is understanding what
ecological battles had to be fought for it to spread with farmers across the
world. And that's another thing we're trying to get out of the genetic
information, both the ancient and the modern genetic information.

Robyn Williams: Yes, you mentioned the tracking to see what routes they
took and how quickly I suppose they got to these far distant places from where
it all began.
Martin Jones: Yeah, there is two bits of genetic information you can use for
that. There's one bit of genetic information, which is sequences of DNA that
we don't think are doing much ecological work, they're not making the plant
bigger or smaller or so forth; there are gaps between genes if I can put it that
way. They're kind of like a tachometer in a car, they just mutate away in a
slightly random way and they record the evolutionary journey. And most work
on DNA and archaeology has used what are called non-coding regions,
because they don't code to make protein and physical things, as a kind of
molecular tachometer, a sort of journey diary of where it happened. And so
we're using those regions to just track whether this bit of barley looks more
similar to that bit of barley and literally join up the dots.
There's also, and we're just starting to do this and this is much newer, is to
actually look at the genes that are doing work. And we're interested in looking
and one or two genes doing work to understand the evolutionary ecology of
this hot climate plant, wild barley, actually moving to every conceivable
ecosystem in the world.

Robyn Williams: Even to the Arctic. How fast did they move, the wheat and
barley?
Martin Jones: Well, 10,500 years ago they're in, you know, the Euphrates
Valley, Syria and parts of Israel and Palestine and so forth; 8000 years ago
they're in Europe; 5000 years ago they're in rather gloomy parts of Europe like
the British Isles, and 2,000 to 3,000 years ago they're heading across
Scandinavia.
Robyn Williams: Practically everywhere. How come you're looking at
millet?
Martin Jones: Well, millet is a crop that we got interested in first of all by
looking at archaeological remains of these crops in Europe. If you look at
European archaeological sites, prehistoric farms, you'll find wheat; you'll find
barley, it's what people have eaten for thousands of years. There are some very
early farming sites, so sites that are 8,000 years old, the first farming sites in
Europe that have a lot of wheat, a lot of barley and a few grains of this small
seeded cereal that some of us know as bird seed called broom corn millet. And
the thing that really interested us about this is, as Chinese archaeology got
going, Chinese archaeologists were finding the same cereal in farmsteads that
were 8,000 years old in inner Mongolia which is obviously right the other side
of a large continent. So, on the one hand, we've been working on wheat and
barley, these very well known crops, and plotting them across a very well
known continent. And there seems to be this other much less significant cereal
on a global scale that nevertheless might have a story about the human
journey of farmers that was very old and unlike anything we've thought of
before; that there may one way or another some sort of contact right at the
earliest stage of farming between east Asia and Europe.
Robyn Williams: Yes, but otherwise they could have popped up twice
separately or was that too unlikely?
Martin Jones: It's not too unlikely, it's happened with some domesticated
animals.
Robyn Williams: Horses I think came twice, didn't they.
Martin Jones: That's right and cattle, or cattle may have come three or four
times and pig now have come several times. There's really three possibilities
about the millet - one, it could have come up twice, by coincidence they could
have a domesticated of the same crop twice. Secondly, they could have
domesticated it in a number of places and thirdly, they could have
domesticated it in northern China and it spread from there. And when we
started the project all three were in the air and if I had laid a bet at the start of
the project I'd have laid a bet on the middle hypothesis - it's being
domesticated all over the place and there was no direct contact. Now that
we've started gathering data from both Europe and north China and now we've
just started tentatively working on the genetics of millet, my money is now on
the third hypothesis, that the earliest sites are in China. But my money might
shift again once we've actually done the genetic and the archaeological work
that we've only just started.
Robyn Williams: So remarkable to have travelled such a long way in those
days, way back then.
Martin Jones: Indeed, but people were moving and if one looks in those
parts of Asia where the journey might have taken place, they are parts of Asia
in which archaeologists are beginning to find there are people around. We've
looked at the ecology of millet, and we've looked at the latitudinal zones where
such a journey might have happened and there's interesting stuff on the way.
One of the interesting stopping points is Lake Baikal, which is the largest
freshwater lake in Asia. And around Lake Baikal a Canadian archaeology team
has done excellent work finding human communities of a similar date, at Lake
Baikal, and this year actually we've just started collaborating and taking out
our botanical sampling kit and seeing what they're eating and we're quite
excited.
Robyn Williams: I can imagine, I hope they've cleaned up Lake Baikal
because it was supposed to be an environmental treasure but it turned out, of
course, from Soviet days to be horribly polluted. Is it alright now?
Martin Jones: My team that went out there, they came back with these
wonderful holiday snaps that made it all look rather charming. ISo, it looks
very nice but it looks very wild and so forth so I guess the fact that it is the
largest body of fresh water it can maybe take a bit of a hammering, so
hopefully the situation that you like to describe is reversible but I'm really not
sure.
Robyn Williams: A final point: somebody else here from Cambridge, Colin
Renfrew, once was talking on The Science Show about how you track the
movement of people and of course in the first instance you've got the
archaeological remains, you can see the houses, you can see the various ruins.
Secondly, you can look at the language and how language changes over time,
and finally, your story of the genes. It would be terribly embarrassing if they
all told a different kind of story, but are they beginning to coincide, these three
streams?
Martin Jones: They're doing two things. Now if we return to Europe and
wheat and barley, because the date is simply the best there, you know, the
languages of Europe are well plotted, the human genes of Europe are well
plotted. At the minute there are so many unknowns in that because the work
hasn't been done, but within Europe you can start doing those independent
maps you talk about. You can do a map of the language families with some
precision; you can do a map of the human genetics; you can do a map of the
archaeological sites and, as you say, now we're building a map from the crops
at the heart of this agricultural spread. Now, at a broad level of resolution
there is a lot of strong resonance between them, but if one looks in fine detail
one does see divergence between them but I don't see that divergence as
uninteresting. I think that divergence is showing us how we have to make our
models more complicated when we get closer to human lives.
For example, one of the things that's very interesting about how those farmers
spread, because of course farmers didn't spread like a virus or an amoeba,
farmers spread through quite complicated social interactions. And if one asked
the question about how they spread, whether it was just the young men going
out and spreading and marrying hunter/gatherer women and bringing some
crops with them. And then the language might come preferencily through
father or mother, at that level of complexity then you can start seeing how
differences have happened might actually show up. On the one hand by
looking at a large scale we might say yes, there's a broad correlation between
these stories, we're on the right track. And then locally when we get difference
we can start asking is this a difference because we're looking largely at
matrilineal societies in which the crops are travelling with one side and the
language is travelling on the other, or are there shifts in that way, or are there
elite dominance in social relationships.

So one can do two things: one can look at the broad picture and start looking,
dissecting the mismatches at the local level and get exciting information out of
both of them.

Robyn Williams: I was talking to Martin Jones in Cambridge, where's

professor of archaeology. I'm Robyn Williams.