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Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome. What's for dinner? You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat...

A research team successfully identified ancient barley and wheat residues in grave goods and on teeth from two Neolithic cemeteries in Central Sudan and Nubia, showing that humans in Africa were already exploited domestic cereals 7,000 years ago and thus five hundred years earlier than previously known. Dr. Welmoed Out from Kiel University said, “With our results we can verify that people along the Nile did not only exploit gathered wild plants and animals but had crops of barley and wheat.” These types of crops were first cultivated in the Middle East about 10,500 years ago and spread out from...

Several top environmental groups have joined with the honey bee industry to urgently demand that President Obama ban a pesticide many blame for the downfall of the world’s No. 1 food pollinator before it is too late.Fearing that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is delaying action, the groups took the unusual step to press Obama directly in a letter that said inaction could jeopardize food supplies.“We hope that you will prioritize action on this issue of vital importance to our food system, economy and environment and make saving bees a key piece of your legacy as president,” said the letter provided...

Using sophisticated 3D imaging to analyze several fossil skulls, a study in this week's Nature Scientific Reports found dogs emerged much more recently than previously thought. Other studies in recent years had suggested dogs evolved as early as 30,000 years ago, a period known as the late Paleolithic, when humans were hunter-gatherers. Abby Grace Drake, a biologist at Skidmore College and one of the co-authors of the latest study, said there is an abundance of evidence -- including the skulls as well as genetic and cultural evidence -- to show dogs arrived instead in the more recent period known as...

Hunter-gatherers had almost no malocclusion and dental crowding, and the condition first became common among the world's earliest farmers some 12,000 years ago in Southwest Asia... By analysing the lower jaws and teeth crown dimensions of 292 archaeological skeletons from the Levant, Anatolia and Europe, from between 28,000-6,000 years ago, an international team of scientists have discovered a clear separation between European hunter-gatherers, Near Eastern/Anatolian semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers and transitional farmers, and European farmers, based on the form and structure of their jawbones... In the case of hunter-gatherers, the scientists from University College Dublin, Israel Antiquity Authority, and the State University...

Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome... You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. There is no telling where it will go and... that...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. There is no telling where it will go and... that...

(Newser) – As many as three million Americans may be allergic to peanuts, the Huffington Post has reported, with one study suggesting that the number of kids with the allergy doubled between 1997 and 2002. But those who are affected may have a reason to smile: A new study could point the way to a cure for the condition, the Australian Associated Press reports via the Guardian. For a year and a half, 30 kids with the allergy were given peanut protein plus a probiotic every day; another 30 received a placebo, researchers at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute report....

California has a way of living up to the worst regulatory expectations, as grocery shoppers across the country are discovering. The state’s latest animal-rights march is levying a punishing new food tax on the nation’s poor. Egg prices are soaring in California, where the USDA says the average price for a dozen jumbo eggs is $3.16, up from $1.18 a dozen a year ago, and in some parts of the state it’s more than $5. (SNIP) The state legislature realized this would put home-state farmers at a disadvantage, so in 2010 it compounded the problem by requiring that eggs imported...

UC Irvine and Australian chemists have figured out how to unboil egg whites – an innovation that could dramatically reduce costs for cancer treatments, food production and other segments of the $160 billion global biotechnology industry, according to findings published today in the journal ChemBioChem. "Yes, we have invented a way to unboil a hen egg," said Gregory Weiss, UCI professor of chemistry and molecular biology & biochemistry. "In our paper, we describe a device for pulling apart tangled proteins and allowing them to refold. We start with egg whites boiled for 20 minutes at 90 degrees Celsius and return...

Consumer doggie DNA testing is old hat at this point, having been around since 2007. But cat-lovers who wish to decipher their pet's breed are out of luck -- no such tests exist for felines. That fact reflects the state of the underlying science. Since the first full dog genome was sequenced ten years ago, geneticists have identified hundreds of genes behind canine diseases and physical traits. By comparison, just a handful of such genes have been identified in cats. But a group of geneticists is working to close this gap by sequencing 99 domestic cats. This week the researchers...

Deere & Co , the world's largest maker of farm equipment, will lay off more than 900 employees at plants in Iowa and Illinois in the latest round of job cuts spurred by a decline in grain prices that is hurting demand for agricultural machinery. The layoffs, which represent about 3 percent of Deere's workforce in the United States and Canada, are set to begin early next month, the company said in a statement. The cuts at facilities that build agricultural equipment reflect Deere's attempt "to align the size of its manufacturing workforce to market demand for products," according to...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. There is no telling where it will go and... that...

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — A breed of giant, ravenous snails that first appeared in Barbados five years ago has thrived on the tropical island, destroying crops and prompting calls for the government to eliminate the slimy pests. A nocturnal "snail hunt" last weekend reported finding hundreds of thousands of giant African snails swarming the central parish of St. George, the country's agricultural heartland, where farmers had complained of damage to crops including sugar cane, bananas and papayas. "We saw snails riding on each other's backs and moving in clusters," said David Walrond, chairman of the local emergency response office, which organized...

...A traveler from Ghana tried to bring 14 Giant African Land Snails into the US...one of the worst invasive species...could have been devastating to crops.

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

Two environmentalist groups filed suit Tuesday seeking stronger protection for a bird found only in Colorado and Utah ... The Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project said in court papers that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should go back and produce an “adequate finding” on the status of the Gunnison sage grouse ... The threatened designation could result in restrictions on oil and gas drilling, agriculture, recreational and other land uses. ... both camps will be watching litigation closely, in part to see how it might influence policy on the more common greater sage grouse. The...

Ninety percent of the fats found in Neolithic cooking pots from Ireland came from dairy products, according to a new study conducted at the University of Bristol. "We know from previous research that dairying was an important part of many early farming economies, but what was a big surprise was the prevalence of dairy residues in Irish pots. It looks to have been a very important food source," said Jessica Smyth of the School of Chemistry. The remaining ten percent of the residues came from beef or mutton fat, or a mixture of milk and meat. "People can obviously cook...

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. There is no telling where it will go and... that...