Explore the vast range of titles available.

Newly acquired palaeobotanical data, including pollen, charred and uncharred wood, provided an exhaustive overview of the temporal changes in woodlands, which changes are due to the cumulative effect of natural processes and the long-term impact of pre-agrarian societies. We used the unique advantage of the peat bog archaeological site at Szczepanki located on an island in the former Lake Staświn (Masurian Lake District) to get an overview of wood exploitation throughout the Stone Age. Special attention was paid to the period of the most intense settlement, the period of the para-Neolithic Zedmar culture. This culture is interesting due to its economy having not been fully recognized so far, especially with respect to the use of plant resources. The evidence from Szczepanki confirmed the use of 16 arboreal taxa, accessible in local woodlands, as a source of timber by foragers. The majority of both unworked wood and fragments bearing traces of processing has been discovered in layers corresponding to the Zedmar period. An important role in the economy was played by wood with medium or low mechanical properties that was however fissile and amenable to woodworking. In addition, other useful properties such as flexibility, lightness, water resistance, strength and ease of splitting were favoured in the selection. The temporal distribution of wood remains in cultural layers at Szczepanki was convergent with a pollen record documenting the course of postglacial migration and local growth of particular taxa, as well as with the archaeologically documented changes in the intensity and time frame of the settlement.

Anthropology, the relativizing countercurrent to Enlightenment notions of civilization and progress, has long challenged notions of backwardness. By contrast, Marxist-Leninist regimes had no doubts about the world-historical backwardness of the largely agrarian societies in which they came to power, which they sought to transform through rapid industrialization. According to some indicators, this socialist civilizing mission was rather successful. Yet memories are mixed, and complicated by the reappearance of typical features of backwardness in the postsocialist era. This article explores changing political economies and the spatiotemporal imaginaries of elites and villagers in Hungary. Historical and theoretical insight is drawn from Ferenc Erdei (1910–1971), a left-leaning populist whose analysis of rural Hungary has more general relevance. Case materials are presented from a region of the Great Plain that in the longue durée exemplifies the “development of underdevelopment” on the margins of Western capitalism. Civilizational transformations were instigated from the east in the socialist decades, but their vehicle was a collectivist ideology that remained alien. The politics and economics of time now render villagers susceptible to populist imaginaries entirely different from those of Erdei.

Human society has changed much over the last centuries and this process of 'modernization' has profoundly affected the lives of individuals; currently we live quite different lives from those forefathers lived only five generations ago. There is difference of opinion as to whether we live better now than before and consequently there is also disagreement as to whether we should continue modernizing or rather try to slow the process down. Quality-of-life in a society can be measured by how long and happy its inhabitants live. Using these indicators I assess whether societal modernization has made life better or worse. Firstly I examine findings of present day survey research. I start with a cross-sectional analysis of 143 nations in the years 2000-2008 and find that people live longer and happier in today's most modern societies. Secondly I examine trends in modern nations over the last decade and find that happiness and longevity have increased in most cases. Thirdly I consider the long-term and review findings from historical anthropology, which show that we lived better in the early hunter-gatherer society than in the later agrarian society. Together these data suggest that societal evolution has worked out differently for the quality of human life, first negatively, in the change from a hunter-gatherer existence to agriculture, and next positively, in the more recent transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. We live now longer and happier than ever before.

Wheat (Triticum spp.) is one of the founder crops that likely drove the Neolithic transition to sedentary agrarian societies in the Fertile Crescent more than 10,000 years ago. Identifying genetic modifications underlying wheat’s domestication requires knowledge about the genome of its allo-tetraploid progenitor, wild emmer (T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides). We report a 10.1-gigabase assembly of the 14 chromosomes of wild tetraploid wheat, as well as analyses of gene content, genome architecture, and genetic diversity. With this fully assembled polyploid wheat genome, we identified the causal mutations in Brittle Rachis 1 (TtBtr1) genes controlling shattering, a key domestication trait. A study of genomic diversity among wild and domesticated accessions revealed genomic regions bearing the signature of selection under domestication. This reference assembly will serve as a resource for accelerating the genome-assisted improvement of modern wheat varieties.

This article explains why elite classes participate in religiously motivated peasant rebellions. This question is important because, although elite resources are required to overcome collective action barriers, extant research ignores why elites collaborate in religiously motivated peasant rebellions. The article compares the Moplah Rebellion in colonial India, the Cristero Rebellion in revolutionary Mexico, and the Chimurenga Rebellion in white-controlled Zimbabwe to test three common explanations for elite participation: low inequality between elites and peasants; moderate political repression or opportunity; and shared religious organizations with the peasantry. The findings demonstrate that elite cooperation is critically contingent on shared religion because it creates cross-class ideologies and lowers the costs of participation by elites. However, the effects of inequality of wealth and political opportunities are inconclusive. By doing so, the article introduces a theory of elite participation that can be tested and refined to understand ongoing religiously motivated rebellions in agrarian societies as disparate as Pakistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Remote sensing (RS) technologies provide a diagnostic tool that can serve as an early warning system, allowing the agricultural community to intervene early on to counter potential problems before they spread widely and negatively impact crop productivity. With the recent advancements in sensor technologies, data management and data analytics, currently, several RS options are available to the agricultural community. However, the agricultural sector is yet to implement RS technologies fully due to knowledge gaps on their sufficiency, appropriateness and techno-economic feasibilities. This study reviewed the literature between 2000 to 2019 that focused on the application of RS technologies in production agriculture, ranging from field preparation, planting, and in-season applications to harvesting, with the objective of contributing to the scientific understanding on the potential for RS technologies to support decision-making within different production stages. We found an increasing trend in the use of RS technologies in agricultural production over the past 20 years, with a sharp increase in applications of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) after 2015. The largest number of scientific papers related to UASs originated from Europe (34%), followed by the United States (20%) and China (11%). Most of the prior RS studies have focused on soil moisture and in-season crop health monitoring, and less in areas such as soil compaction, subsurface drainage, and crop grain quality monitoring. In summary, the literature highlighted that RS technologies can be used to support site-specific management decisions at various stages of crop production, helping to optimize crop production while addressing environmental quality, profitability, and sustainability.

SignificanceClimate change is expected to reshape the distribution of irrigated lands. Using climatic projections from three global climate models, we investigate global patterns of irrigation water demand and availability in 1.5 °C and 3 °C warmer climates. We find that in up to 35% of currently rain-fed croplands, irrigation could be expanded as an adaptation strategy to climate change without negative environmental externalities on freshwater resources. Irrigation expansion could reduce vulnerability to water stress and improve crop productivity to feed up to 300 million additional people using small-scale water storage and up to 1.4 billion additional people using large-scale water storage. This work contributes to identifying target regions where investments in sustainable intensification of agriculture through irrigation expansion are needed. Climate change is expected to affect crop production worldwide, particularly in rain-fed agricultural regions. It is still unknown how irrigation water needs will change in a warmer planet and where freshwater will be locally available to expand irrigation without depleting freshwater resources. Here, we identify the rain-fed cropping systems that hold the greatest potential for investment in irrigation expansion because water will likely be available to suffice irrigation water demand. Using projections of renewable water availability and irrigation water demand under warming scenarios, we identify target regions where irrigation expansion may sustain crop production under climate change. Our results also show that global rain-fed croplands hold significant potential for sustainable irrigation expansion and that different irrigation strategies have different irrigation expansion potentials. Under a 3 °C warming, we find that a soft-path irrigation expansion with small monthly water storage and deficit irrigation has the potential to expand irrigated land by 70 million hectares and feed 300 million more people globally. We also find that a hard-path irrigation expansion with large annual water storage can sustainably expand irrigation up to 350 million hectares, while producing food for 1.4 billion more people globally. By identifying where irrigation can be expanded under a warmer climate, this work may serve as a starting point for investigating socioeconomic factors of irrigation expansion and may guide future research and resources toward those agricultural communities and water management institutions that will most need to adapt to climate change.

The gut microbiota has a profound impact on human health. Emerging data show that dietary patterns are associated with different communities of bacterial species within the gut. Prevotella species have been correlated with plant-rich diets, abundant in carbohydrates and fibres. Dysbiosis within the gut ecosystem has been associated with the development of non-communicable diseases such as obesity, the metabolic syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, colorectal cancer, type 1 diabetes, allergies and other diseases. The purpose of this comprehensive literature review was to evaluate the available data on the impact of diet on the Prevotella genus, as a dietary fibre fermenter in the gut as well as its implications as a potential biomarker for homeostasis or disease state through its metabolite signature. Studies were identified by conducting PubMed, Web of Science Core Collection and Google Scholar electronic searches. We found eighty-five publications reporting the impact of dietary patterns on gut microbial communities, including Prevotella or Prevotella/Bacteroides ratio in particular. Moreover, the role of Prevotella species on health status was also evaluated. Prevotella possess a high genetic diversity, representing one of the important groups found in the oral cavity and large intestine of man. The gut commensal Prevotella bacteria contribute to polysaccharide breakdown, being dominant colonisers of agrarian societies. However, studies also suggested a potential role of Prevotella species as intestinal pathobionts. Further metagenomic studies are needed in order to reveal health- or disease-modulating properties of Prevotella species in the gut.

Population growth, climate change, and the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic are imposing increasing pressure on global agricultural production. The challenge of increasing crop yield while ensuring sustainable development of environmentally friendly agriculture is a common issue throughout the world. Autonomous systems, sensing technologies, and artificial intelligence offer great opportunities to tackle this issue. In precision agriculture (PA), non-destructive and non-invasive remote and proximal sensing methods have been widely used to observe crops in visible and invisible spectra. Nowadays, the integration of high-performance imagery sensors (e.g., RGB, multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, and SAR) and unmanned mobile platforms (e.g., satellites, UAVs, and terrestrial agricultural robots) are yielding a huge number of high-resolution farmland images, in which rich crop information is compressed. However, this has been accompanied by challenges, i.e., ways to swiftly and efficiently making full use of these images, and then, to perform fine crop management based on information-supported decision making. In the past few years, deep learning (DL) has shown great potential to reshape many industries because of its powerful capabilities of feature learning from massive datasets, and the agriculture industry is no exception. More and more agricultural scientists are paying attention to applications of deep learning in image-based farmland observations, such as land mapping, crop classification, biotic/abiotic stress monitoring, and yield prediction. To provide an update on these studies, we conducted a comprehensive investigation with a special emphasis on deep learning in multiscale agricultural remote and proximal sensing. Specifically, the applications of convolutional neural network-based supervised learning (CNN-SL), transfer learning (TL), and few-shot learning (FSL) in crop sensing at land, field, canopy, and leaf scales are the focus of this review. We hope that this work can act as a reference for the global agricultural community regarding DL in PA and can inspire deeper and broader research to promote the evolution of modern agriculture.

Parts II and III treated the shift from \"traditional\" to more \"modern\" marketing systems and showed how Communist collectivization had built on premodern patterns, preserving both the village community and the standard marketing area. Because of their analytic novelty, these articles stimulated dozens of anthropologists to study marketing in different types of agrarian societies all over the world.