Question: The language-farming dispersal hypothesis postulates that the current biogeographic distribution of global ethnolinguistic diversity is due to prehistoric demic expansions of agricultural populations. Does human population size increase as diet is increasingly based on agriculture, and is this relation moderated by agricultural potential, as predicted by the language-farming dispersal...

Smallholder farming systems in Papua New Guinea are characterised by an integrated set of cash cropping and subsistence food cropping activities. In the Highlands provinces, the subsistence food crop sub-system is dominated by sweet potato production. Coffee dominates the cash cropping sub-system, but a limited number of food crops are also grown for cash sale. The dynamics between sub-systems ...

Detailed studies of the long-term development of plant use strategies indicate that plant subsistence patterns have noticeably changed since the Upper Paleolithic, when humans underwent a transitional process from foraging to agriculture. This transition was best recorded in west Asia; however, information about how plant subsistence changed during this transition remains limited in China. This...

Diversification of agricultural systems is a standard suggestion for increasing the resilience of rain-fed subsistence farming to drought. However, grain crops share many physiological characteristics, potentially forming a plant functional type (PFT), a term ecologists apply to groups of species that respond in functionally similar ways to environmental variation. Here we test whether grain cr...

The evolution of agricultural economies requires two processes: 1) the domestication of plants and 2) specialization in domesticates at the expense of hunting and gathering. Yet, in the literature, domestication receives the lions share of attention while theories of specialization in domesticates lag behind. In this paper, we integrate ideas from human behavioral ecology with tools from dynami...

This paper describes how the social capital of rice farmers of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, as manifested in the tradition of collective farming practice, has changed. Collective rice farming persisted for decades, irrespective of critical events that challenged its continuation, due to two key factors: the high need for collective farming to ensure subsistence, and the availability of a closel...

Food security is a prerequisite for health. Availability and accessibility of food in rural areas is mainly achieved through subsistence production in which community members use local practices to produce and preserve food. Subsistence food production ensures self-sufficiency and reduction of poverty and hunger. The main emphasis with the present study is examining subsistence farming and coll...

The attine ant-fungus agricultural symbiosis evolved over tens of millions of years, producing complex societies with industrial-scale farming analogous to that of humans. Here we document reciprocal shifts in the genomes and transcriptomes of seven fungus-farming ant species and their fungal cultivars. We show that ant subsistence farming probably originated in the early Tertiary (55-60 MYA), ...