Rachel Laudan

    The New York Times a couple of days ago had a long and well researched article on the slowing of Mexican migration to the United States. Yeah. Mexican is getting wealthier.  In fact Mexico is now 80% urban, something that has a lot to do with this.  Peasants eking out a living on [...]

Caption: These are Middle Stone Age food processing tools recovered from the Ngalue cave site, Mozambique. Credit: Grady Semmens, University of Calgary Usage Restrictions: None It used to be the story that farming and grain eating came along together 10,000 years or so ago. Then evidence of grass seed use in Israel and of granaries [...]

Last week Onkel Bob posted a long response to my post, Bread first or beer first? A bad question. He made several interesting points but the most important point, to which he kept returning, was “How did agriculture start at all?” or “What prompted widespread fields?” That’s an interesting question.  But in my opinion it [...]