This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. And Jessica Young. With our bi-weekly Science News Roundup Thanksgiving edition. Featuring the hosts of All Things Considered, today we have Ari Shapiro.
It's so honored to be here.
Oh, thanks for stopping by. So combing through all the headlines, all of the embargo journals, we found some pretty interesting stuff.
Yes. Today we have a Thanksgiving buffet for you of one. Genetics. That's proving indigenous hazelnut cultivation in Canada.
How an ancient piece of meteorite from Mars points to a possibly habitable past.
And a very large fish mysteriously washing up on the coast of California.
We've got hazelnuts. We've got fish. It sounds like a Thanksgiving feast.
Delicious. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, let's talk about what makes shortwave possible. Shortwave is possible because of you. Because we work for NPR, and NPR is public media. We exist not to make money, but to create a more informed public. You can think of public media like a public sidewalk or a public park. It's infrastructure that we all use. It's free. It's for everyone. And that's why we work really hard to bring you stories about science that matter to you, no matter where you live or what community you belong to. We love doing this work. And this time of year, I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening and for your support. And if this is a mission you believe in and you have the ability to throw a few dollars our way, I want to remind you that Giving Tuesday is almost here. So it is really the perfect time to keep the shortwave train running and free. One way to do this is by signing up for NPR+. You'll get sponsor-free episodes and all kinds of perks across more than 25 podcasts within the NPR portfolio.
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All right, I want to start with hazelnuts because I grew up in the state of Oregon, which produces more than 90% of the U.S. hazelnut crop. But we're talking about hazelnuts in Canada. What's going on?
Yeah, so the star of the science show today is the beaked hazelnut. Beaked? They are related to those commercial hazelnuts. You are familiar with the ones that flavor Nutella and the like. But beaked hazelnuts are actually a wild food native to North America.
Cool. What do they taste like?
Okay, so they're said to be a little sweeter, more buttery, and nestled in this fuzzy green husk that extends outward, like the beak of a bird. And for generations, the indigenous people of British Columbia passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source they actively planted and cultivated.
Marion Dixon, Walt Chalkosman, and Klikat Maka Elder I worked with said it was her job in the summer to transplant hazelnut. She would go around and just take out little cuttings with her uncle. This is in the 50s.
Chelsea Grelda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University wanted to look at hazelnut genetics to determine just how widely the hazelnut was cultivated. So her team visited the archaeological remains of village sites throughout British Columbia and sampled over 200 hazelnuts nearby.
And what did they find?
All these genetic subgroups. Many hazelnuts traced to the far reaches of British Columbia, some 800 kilometers or 500 miles away, which is way too far to have traveled primarily via a bird or a squirrel, which are like dropping the hazelnuts.
meaning it had to be the ancestors of First Nations tribes who deliberately brought beaked hazelnuts with them.
And Ari, this genetic detective work, it verifies First Nations oral history, showing that beaked hazelnut cultivation is a many thousand year practice and that First Nations people changed the forest in long lasting ways. Chelsea published these results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.
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