Samplings: October 2009

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New Guineans pose while planting yams in a garden (early twentieth century). (gutenberg.org/license)

Australian Aborigines were quintessential hunter–gatherers before their eighteenth-century encounter with Europeans—or so it has been thought. Now three scientists argue that Aborigines may once have had green thumbs, a long time ago.

The ancient horticultural practices of New Guinea spread to the south over a land bridge that once connected the island to northern Australia, claim archaeologist Tim Denham of Monash University in Clayton, Australia, and two colleagues, resurrecting a twenty-year-old hypothesis. New Guinea is one of the birthplaces of agriculture, where some kinds of taro, bananas, and yams were domesticated starting 10,000 years ago.

 Denham and colleagues offer the greater yam, Dioscorea alata, as support. The vine, prized for its starchy tubers, has no wild type: all known populations worldwide are cultivars originally planted by hungry humans. The greater yam now grows wild in northern Australia, both along the coast and inland, and there’s nothing in herbaria or history books to suggest it was introduced after European colonization.

The yams—as well as suspicious, albeit wild-type, populations of bananas and taro in the same region—may be the descendants of plants once cultivated by Aborigines, who would have learned the techniques from their neighbors to the north. It appears, however, that after sea levels rose around 8,000 years ago and the Torres Strait isolated New Guinea, native Australians lost their gardening habits. (Antiquity)