Food on the Move

By Claire Eamer

A vital component of a turkey dinner.
Image by skeeze from Pixabay

I've been thinking a lot about food lately. One reason is that I have been auditing a university class on food and drink in the archaeological record. Somehow, ancient peoples seem much more real when you start to figure out what they snacked on during a workday and what they ate and drank at a feast.

(Auditing classes, I've discovered, is a blast! All the fun of learning with none of the stress of exams.)

The other reason for thinking of food, of course, is that we're approaching the season of winter feasting. Turkey dinner. Mashed potatoes. Corn on the cob. Roasted squash. Cranberry sauce. Maybe a little hot sauce on the side for those who like dash of fire with their food.

But if you'd mentioned any of those foods to someone from Europe, Africa, or any part of Asia 600 years ago, they would have been baffled. All those foods came from the Americas, and no one outside the Americas had eaten them until the European invasion of the Americas began just over 500 years ago.

(Okay -- Europe has a kind of wild cranberry, but it's not the sort you'll find in the cranberry sauce served with your Christmas turkey.)

I learned just how many foods originated in the Americas a few years ago when I was researching The World in Your Lunch Box: The Wacky History and Weird Science of Everyday Foods. I was amazed -- not just at the variety of foods, but at how skilled the farmers of the Americas were and how quickly their foods spread to the rest of the world.

Teosinte is on the left, and modern corn is on the
right. Between them is a hybrid of teosinte and corn.
Image by John Doebley.

Consider, for example, corn. At least 8000 years ago, the people who lived in what is now Mexico and Central America began a long process of crop breeding that turned a common grass called teosinte into maize -- the plant served up as everything from tortillas to corn on the cob. Today, maize is still an extremely important food in Central and South America, but it's also the most important food crop in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Or look at potatoes. They come from the Andes in South America, and you'll still find the biggest variety of potatoes there. But 500 years ago, the Spanish took a few kinds of potatoes back to Europe, and they spread. They spread so far and so fast that China is now the world's biggest producer and consumer of potatoes.

And that delicious-smelling turkey? The Ancient Puebloans who lived in the famous cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde 800 years ago kept turkeys penned in the alcoves behind their houses. In other parts of North America, such as the forests of what is now the eastern United States, turkeys were so plentiful that people didn't bother to keep them penned up. Why feed a bird when it can feed itself and still be available to hunt when you need it?

Those are just a few of the foods that came from the Americas. They, along with chili peppers, tomatoes, squash, chocolate, and a cornucopia of other delights, changed the nature and flavour of food around the world.

Now I'm hungry!

When Did Humans Reach the Americas?

By Claire Eamer

Now there's a question that opens a can of worms!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short news article -- Archaeological Find Puts Humans in North America 10,000 Years Earlier Than Thought -- for Hakai Magazine. It was about a new analysis of bones found 40 years ago in the Bluefish Caves in the northern Yukon by Canadian anthropologist Jacques Cinq-Mars. The magazine followed it up with a lengthy and fascinating piece by Heather Pringle: From Vilified to Vindicated: the Story of Jacques Cinq-Mars.

Doctoral student Lauriane Bourgeon's analysis of the bones, particularly a horse jawbone with cut marks on it, appears to confirm Cinq-Mars's original conclusion -- that human hunters were using the Bluefish Caves at least 24,000 years ago, at the height of the last glaciation. At that time sea levels were much lower than today, and people could have crossed to North America from Siberia on the wide, dry, windswept plains of Beringia, a route now blocked by the waters of the Bering Strait.


At the time Cinq-Mars published his first account of the excavation, the prevailing theory said humans arrived in North America from northeastern Siberia about 14,000 years ago at a time when the glaciers were finally disappearing, but when there was still a dry-land link between Asia and North America. They then followed an ice-free corridor between glaciers that led them south to the rest of the Americas. The problem with that theory is the growing body of evidence that no such corridor existed or was inhabitable at that time, as well as another growing body of evidence that people were living well south of the glaciated lands before the glaciers disappeared.

Cinq-Mars's find and Bourgeon's re-analysis of it support another theory: the Beringian standstill hypothesis. According to that theory, humans moved into the dry region linking Asia and North America 10,000 years or more before the great ice sheets melted and the sea level rose. And there they stayed, making a decent living from the animals -- both large and small -- that shared their giant refuge from the ice.

But what about those people living farther south when the ice was still melting? Current thinking suggests they might have arrived by sea, travelling down the west coast of North America, with its rich resources of shellfish and other coastal foods. A report just released dates a cache of artifacts found in Idaho to 16,000 years ago. A joint research effort by Western scientists and First Nations in British Columbia recently found even more startling evidence to support the coastal theory -- 29 footprints left, probably, by a small family walking along a beach 13,000 years ago.

Unravelling the mystery of humans in the Americas is no easy task. Much of the evidence was ground to dust by kilometres-deep ice or flooded by rising seas as the ice melted. But scientists and Indigenous peoples are working on it. It's still a can of worms, but each worm that emerges changes the picture slightly and makes it a little clearer. And a lot more interesting.

Claire Eamer's most recent book is Out of the Ice: How Climate Change is Revealing the Past (Kids Can Press, 2018).

Naming Weather Highs and Lows

By Adrienne Montgomerie

When the weather forecast calls for a Colorado low or a Texas low, what does that mean?

The name is actually pretty easy to figure out: The low or high refers to the air pressure. The place name tells you where it is coming from. Weather generally moves across the North American continent from west to east, and more often from south to north.

Low pressure tends to bring clouds and warmer temperatures.
High pressure is associated with clear skies and cold.

So a Colorado low is an area of low pressure that formed in the US state of Colorado. It usually forms in winter and brings a lot more precipitation than usual for several days. From Colorado in the centre-west of the USA, that weather can travel up to Winnipeg and right over to the Atlantic ocean. Because it's winter, that precipitation is usually snow, which we can have a lot of fun with!

Another system that usually brings a lot of snowfall is a Texas low. As it moves across the continent, it picks up a lot of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. When it reaches the colder temperatures of the Great Lakes, it drops that moisture as heaps and heaps of snow. It is said that most snowstorms in Ontario come from a Texas low.

An Alberta clipper is a little harder to figure out. Like the names for highs and lows, the place name tells you where it is coming from; but what does "clipper" mean? It's a system of low pressure too. Unlike the general way that weather systems move, the Alberta clipper heads southeast, toward the Great Lakes into the US. It carries precipitation and a quick drop in temperature plus strong wind. The winds are why this weather system is called a clipper: clippers were the fastest ships in the 19th century.

Sometimes there is more than one of these weather systems happening at once. Then, they can collide or clash, resulting in an even bigger storm.

Keep your ears open. What other storm names do you hear? Can you use what you know about lows and highs now to predict what kind of weather they will bring your way? If you live on the west coast, where do your weather systems come from?