utenzi

The following is a story off of the science section of the Reuters Newswire service. It's an interesting story but I don't think the conclusion necessarily follows the evidence. It could be valid, but there are other more likely explanations. Since I doubt the researchers being quoted are foolish, the fault probably lies in the reporting not the research being done--and this is often a problem when reporters convert science work into marketable stories for widespread distribution. Here's the situation: a discovery of some mutant figs, according to the story, pushes back the origination of organized agriculture nearly 5,000 years--almost double the current estimate. Now, in my mind that's a huge change and as such quite likely wrong. So the first thing I'd do is see if there's an alternate explanation. Of course there is an alternate--the figs were gathered from a wild tree that the village folk fortuitously found. To hypothesize that organized orchards were deve...