Short Wave - This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their ancestors planted and cultivated. These stories motivated Chelsea Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University to look more deeply at the genetics of the beaked hazelnut and determine just how widely it was cultivated. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.Another science story in the news catch your eye? Let us know by emailing [e-mail] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. And Jessica Young. With our biweekly science news roundup Thanksgiving edition. Featuring the hosts of All Things Considered, today we have Ari Shapiro. So honored to be here. Oh, thanks for stopping by. So coming 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, short waver's 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 of you. 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. 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 Plus. You'll get sponsor-free episodes and all kinds of perks across more than 25 podcasts within the NPR portfolio. Just visit plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. The other way you can give is simply by making a donation at donate.npr.org. Your gifts are tax deductible either way. All right.

Grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Back to the show. 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 hazel nuts. As a vital food source, they actively planted in. and cultivated. Marion Dixon, while Chalkoos, and then Klaatmaa 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 is like dropping the hazelnut. 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 change the forest in long-lasting ways.

Chelsea published these results in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month. That's cool. How does it change our understanding of agricultural history? Yeah. Well, it really challenges this idea that First Nations people had a passive relationship to the land. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the land-backed movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes. Crab apples and hazelnuts and certain other species that have edible fruit and nuts, they weren't just accidentally found in the edges of the forest.

Those were deliberately planted. Jack told me he plans to refer to Chelsea's research in future court cases, while he argues for First Nation Aboriginal title over certain Canadian lands. Cool. All right, let's go to Mars next. You're telling me it was habitable long ago? Well, possibly. We've at least learned that some of the conditions necessary for life,

could have been present a long time ago, because scientists have found more evidence that there might have been hydrothermal vents on Mars. Wait, hydrothermal vents like hot springs on the seafloor? Yes, exactly. They spew out hot liquid mixed with gases and minerals. Hyrothermal vents are discussed a lot as a theoretical origin point for life on Earth. You can actually hear a lot about it in a shortwave episode. Gina did a few weeks ago.

But yeah, we could talk about that forever, so we shouldn't get to it. Okay, so back to the new discovery. How did scientists find out that there might be hydrothermal vents? on Mars. So basically, it's an amazing story. Around 10 years ago, a rock was found in the Sahara Desert, and it turned out to be a meteorite from Mars. So some scientists at Curtin University in Australia have been studying this rock in the last few years. Yeah. So something that is really important to note about this rock is that the meteorite has zircon in it, which is a mineral that is very nice to have if you're a geologist because you can date when it was formed. Scientists use zircon all the time to date rocks on Earth. And this team found that some of this small hunk of Mars was formed, get this, 4.5 billion years ago. That's not long after the solar system was formed, right? Yes, this rock originates from perhaps the beginning chapters of Mars's history. One of the researchers who's been studying this, geologist Aaron Kovosi, explained to me that they tried to get as much information as they could out of this rare bit of ancient zircon, despite its tiny size.

The zircon is half the width of a human hair, and we have tools to extract little slices of it that kind of are shaped like a little tiny slice of bread and then subject them to a variety of different analyses where we can look at the individual atoms and see what's going on. Okay, so you've got these tiny bread slices thinner than half a human hair, and what did they learn from it? Not what they expected. Here is Aaron again. The zircon had these elements preserved in its structure in arrangements that are kind of like the layers of an onion. So what Aaron and his team did next was look at zircons on Earth, zircons from all kinds of different environments trying to figure out what conditions could make zircon look like this. And they found an example of a zircon with this onion-like pattern that was found in a hydrothermal vent on Earth. Oh, so that's why the researchers connected hydrothermal vents to this sample from Mars.

Exactly. And they wrote about that connection. in their paper out this month in the journal Science advances. Yeah, and while liquid water on Mars may not be new news exactly, this research suggests Mars once had this hot liquid crust, maybe even way back at the beginning. But talking to other researchers in the field, more evidence is needed before we can say that this is likely the case. All right. From planets, let's go to fish. Orfish. That's O-A-R-Fish. What's this story? So earlier this month, an oarfish washed up along the southern California coast. Generally, orefish are long and slender, kind of like giant eels.

They can grow to be longer than a school bus. They have big eyes, but no scales or teeth. And as our colleague James Dubeck reported, this was the third to show up since August. Now, this is pretty interesting because in the last 120-plus years, scientists have only spotted 22 of these oarfish on the California coast. 22 in more than a century, but three since August? Yeah, it's kind of like a good time for oarfish research, you could say. Now, this fish, it lives pretty deep in the ocean, swims anywhere from 300 to 3,000 feet deep.

It rarely comes to the surface. They generally show up on beaches like when they're injured or disoriented. Given how rare it is to see them, it's really no surprise that these fish are more of a thing of folklore. Ooh, are you going to tell me a folktale? Well, occasionally in history, some Japanese media has linked deep sea fish like the orfish with earthquakes as bad omens that warn people in earthquake is coming within the next several weeks. Though we should immediately say in 2019, Japanese researchers looked into this link and didn't find a relationship at all between orfish sightings and earthquakes. So no one panic. I don't know if they were looking hard enough. But anyway, why might some of these orfish be washing up now?

Honestly, we're seemingly mid-mystery at this point. Scientists said that it may have to do with changes in ocean condition like the El Nina or La Nina cycle or Red Tides, for example. But in the meantime, it is an orfish mystery. Ari, come kick it with us any time. It's been a delight. You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This, NPR's Afternoon News Podcast, about what the news means for you. Check it out.

Subscribe now. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intaliata. Tyler Jones, Check the Facts. David Greenberg and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Jessica Young. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast,

NPR.