Agriculture

  2012 AUG 30 (VerticalNews) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Agriculture Week -- Investigators publish new report on Anthropology. According to news reporting originating from Fife, United Kingdom, by VerticalNews correspondents, research stated, "Theory and empirical data from a variety of disciplines strongly imply that recent human history involves extensive gene-culture coevolution, much of it as a direct result of human agricultural practices. Here we draw on niche-construction theory (NCT) and gene-culture coevolutionary theory (GCT) to propose a broad theoretical framework (NCT-GCT) with which archaeologists and anthropologists can explore coevolutionary dynamics. ...read more

  2012 APR 12 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "Smallholder farmers rely on labor exchange to generate agricultural work when cash is rare and credit unavailable. Reciprocal altruism, biased by genetic kinship, has been implicated as the mechanism responsible for labor exchange; however, few empirical tests confirm this proposition," scientists in Pullman, Washington report.

  "Competitive altruism could be operating if people differ in ability and use this information as a criterion for partnership selection. Labor exchange data are presented from a Dominican smallholder village over a 10-month period within the village's primary cash economic opportunity, bay oil production. Results indicate that competitive altruism better explains variation in labor exchange relationships and group size than reciprocal altruism and kinship, suggesting the presence of a biologic market for male exchange relationships. Bay oil laborers vary in altruistic behaviors, causing reputations for altruism to emerge. Men with reputations as high-quality altruists generate larger labor groups in bay oil production than do poor-quality ones. Larger groups induce bargaining wars, causing men to compete through altruistic acts, which allows high-quality individuals to discriminate potential partners for labor exchange relationships," wrote S.J. Macfarlan and colleagues, Washington State University ...read more

  2012 JAN 5 - (VerticalNews.com) -- "In the past 10 years, flotation techniques have been introduced and implemented in Chinese archaeology. As a result, a tremendous quantity of plant remains have been recovered from archaeological sites located all over China," investigators in Beijing, People's Republic of China report.

  "These plant remains include crops that might have been domesticated in China-such as rice, foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and soybean-as well as crops that were introduced into China from other parts of world-such as wheat and barley. The new archaeobotanic data provide direct archaeological evidence for the study of the origins and development of agriculture in China," wrote Z.J. Zhao and colleagues, Science Institute ...read more