This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada

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 https://www.sfu.ca/indg/about/people/faculty/chelsey-geralda-armstrong.html 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 https://jackwoodward.ca/ 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 [email protected] mailto:[email protected] — 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+ atplus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://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 https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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  This message comes from University at Buffalo, where scientists are working to protect the Great Lakes and freshwater supplies around the world from harmful contamination. Learn more about their research at buffalo.edu/npr.

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  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:20Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here.

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  And Jessica Young.

• 0:23Emily Kwong?

  With our biweekly Science News roundup, Thanksgiving edition, featuring the hosts of All Things Considered, today we have Ari Shapiro.

• 0:31Speaker 03

  So honored to be here.

• 0:33Emily Kwong?

  Oh, thanks for stopping by.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  So combing through all the headlines, all of the embargo journals, we found some pretty interesting stuff.

• 0:40Emily Kwong?

  Yes, today we have a Thanksgiving buffet for you of one: genetics. That's proving indigenous hazelnut cultivation in Canada.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  How an ancient piece of meteorite from Mars points to a possibly habitable past.

• 0:52Emily Kwong?

  And a very large fish mysteriously washing up on the coast of California.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  We've got hazelnuts, we've got fish. It sounds like a Thanksgiving feast.

• 0:59Emily Kwong?

  Delicious.

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  All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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  This message comes from University at Buffalo, where five decades of AI research is producing advancements that put people first, tackling real-world problems for progress, not profit, empowering, not replacing. Learn how the University of Buffalo is using AI responsibly to create a better, brighter future for all at buffalo.edu/npr. This message comes from Whole Foods Market. Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And all their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup.

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• 2:52Emily Kwong?

  Hey, short waivers. Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, let's talk about what makes short wave possible. Short wave 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.

• 3:34Emily Kwong?

  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 short wave 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.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  All right, I want to start with hazelnuts because I grew up in the state of Oregon,

• 4:21Emily Kwong?

  Ah, yes.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  which produces more than 90% of the US hazelnut crop. But we're talking about hazelnuts in Canada. What's going on?

• 4:27Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so the star of the science show today is the beaked hazelnut.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Beaked?

• 4:30Emily Kwong?

  They are related to those commercial hazelnuts. You are familiar with the ones that flavor Nutella and the like.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:36Emily Kwong?

  But beaked hazelnuts are actually a wild food native to North America.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Cool. What do they taste like?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  OK, 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.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  Marion Dixon, Walt Chalkosman, Kla Khatmaka 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.

• 5:09Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  And what did they find?

• 5:25Emily Kwong?

  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, like dropping the hazelnut.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Meaning it had to be the ancestors of First Nations tribes who deliberately brought beaked hazelnuts with them.

• 5:45Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  That's cool. How does it change our understanding of agricultural history?

• 6:06Emily Kwong?

  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-back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.

• 6:25Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:35Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Cool. All right, let's go to Mars next. You're telling me it was habitable long ago?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Wait, hydrothermal vents like hot springs on the seafloor?

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes, exactly. They spew out hot liquid mixed with gases and minerals. Hydrothermal 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 too into it.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Okay, so back to the new discovery. How did scientists find out that there might be hydrothermal vents on Mars?

• 7:24Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:51Emily Kwong?

  And this team found that some of this small hunk of Mars was formed, get this, 4.5 billion years ago.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  That's not long after the solar system was formed, right?

• 8:01Emily Kwong?

  Yes, this rock originates from perhaps the beginning chapters of Mars's history.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  One of the researchers who's been studying this, geologist Aaron Cavosi, 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.

• 8:16Speaker 07

  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 and see what's going on.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Okay, so you've got these tiny bread slices thinner than half a human hair. And what did they learn from it?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Not what they expected. Here is Aaron again.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  The zircon had these elements preserved in its structure in arrangements that are kind of like the layers of an onion.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Oh, so that's why the researchers connected hydrothermal vents to this sample from Mars.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  All right, from planets, let's go to fish. Oarfish, that's O A R fish. What's the story?

• 9:37Speaker 02

  So earlier this month, an oarfish washed up along the southern California coast. Generally, oarfish 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 Dubek 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.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  22 in more than a century, but three since August?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Ooh, are you gonna tell me a folk tale?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Well, occasionally in history, some Japanese media has linked deep sea fish, like the oarfish, with earthquakes as bad omens that warn people an earthquake is coming within the next several weeks.

• 10:42Emily Kwong?

  Though, we should immediately say in 2019, Japanese researchers looked into this link and didn't find a relationship at all between oarfish sightings and earthquakes. So no one panic.

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I don't know if they were looking hard enough. But anyway, why might some of these oarfish be washing up now?

• 10:58Speaker 02

  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 Niña or La Niña cycle, or red tides, for example.

• 11:09Emily Kwong?

  But in the meantime, it is an oarfish mystery.

• 11:15Emily Kwong?

  Ari, come kick it with us anytime.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  It's been a delight.

• 11:19Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones, check the facts.

• 11:40Emily Kwong?

  David Greenberg and Jimmy Keely were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  And I'm Jessica Young. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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