We left off after covering the usual bases for growing, harvesting, and celebrating the Cucurbit crops, all members of the Squash family: zucchini, cucumber, winter squash, melons, etc. If you missed it, check back in here after reading: We belong together: Curcubits and adapting to rapid change, pt I.
As promised, we’ll find out what the extinction of megafauna in North America had to do with the domestication of squash crops. We’ll look at how the unique skin of winter squash and gourds becomes critically important in our co-evolutionary history. Finally, we’ll talk about skin, our largest organ, and its role in adapting to climate change.
Let’s step into the evolution elevator. Hit the button for 10,000 years ago in North America.
We descend into an ice-dependent ecosystem, beginning the transition to grasslands and forest. While skeletons of giant beaver, mammoth, and other megafauna are still dispersed throughout the region, none are seen building dams or grazing with their young. The mammoths didn’t only leave behind hungry humans, who had traditionally hunted them. They also left behind wild squash plants, the ancestors of the squash we know and love today. As it turns out, fossilized remains of mammoth poop contained a lot of squash seeds. Without the mammoths to bust through the rind and distribute the seeds, they may have been lost to time.
The humans who lived through the Ice Age must have felt bewildered by this climate transformation. Some scientists believe that much of the warming happened at an accelerated rate in the final 200 years before the Holocene era. Soil and rock, dropped by the drifting glaciers in this part of the Midwest, were exposed for the first time. The Great Lakes filled with fresh water from the melting ice.
There must have been a lot of decay in the beginning, as well. Many species, including plants and animals, didn’t survive the beginning of the Holocene era. Humans got their big moment in the wake of the Ice Age, right around the same time they noticed they could use tools to open the hard rinds of squash left behind by the mammoths. The seeds were quite edible. The squash plants themselves were very responsive agricultural partners, hybridizing readily. Eventually, the bitter flavor of the squash flesh was bred out.
The result? Hundreds of different varieties of cultivated squash, and a human civilization that touches every corner of the Earth. It probably would have happened even without squash on board, but nonetheless, it is part of the story we’re living in today.
Another way that squash influenced humans was through the use of dried gourds as storage containers. Squash wasn’t content with feeding us wherever we went. Its thick, protective barrier of skin wasn’t just for protecting young seeds from ice, heat, and predation. It was also a sophisticated mode of transporting liquids, food, and yes, seeds. This practice supported cross-regional trade and extended the storage capacity for food and crop seed. Their uses extend to art and ritual, as well.
Every year, we prize our hard-headed melons, winter squash, and pumpkins every fall. This week’s box featured the first melons that we’ve grown ourselves in quite some time. Soon, we’ll be harvesting and curing winter squash. They get us through the winter with their sweetness, the seeds providing a crunchy snack. The skin is either scooped out and discarded, or peeled and left in ribbons in the compost, but that is where some of the magic is.
As farmers, we know that the skin is everything when it comes to growing squash. Once the skin is compromised, whether by insects, hail, predation, or something else, it’s unsaleable. We’ll use it up before it goes south, but it’s not for storage because it won’t last without the skin barrier intact.
The strength of the squash’s skin is what allows the flesh to fill out, the seeds inside to develop, and the ability to hold together for long periods of time.
In humans, the skin is not only our largest organ, but also our most sensitive - in fact, most of what we can describe as our senses is connected to the skin in some way, through nerves and hairs.
Not only that, but our skin carries deep meaning and identity for us. It has everything to do with how we appear to other people and ourselves. It is also one of the most adaptable features of the human body. And I don’t just mean tattoos!
Despite what Sidney Sweeney’s recent ad campaign may assert, genes are not the sole determiner of skin color. Skin variations in melanin are an epigenetic response to the ancestral environment of a population. This adaptation effectively modulates the amount of UV radiation allowed to penetrate the skin. It may take 10 thousand years, or it could happen in as little as 100 generations, but genes for skin color are not stable. Populations can change according to the level of UV exposure. Therefore, difference in skin color is not indicative of genetic difference so much as global distribution. You can be more genetically similar to someone who is much darker or lighter than you, than someone else whose skin tone matches yours. It’s like a scientific kiss of death to any argument in favor of eugenics. All genes respond to their environment in a large enough time context. That’s part of what helped us adapt to a changing climate before.
For all these reasons and more, we have to hand it to our skin. It works overtime as the first stage of immune defense, temperature modulator, sensory detector, and an organs and blood protector.
On top of that, our skin is confronted with all the wear and tear of our lives. With the changing atmosphere and disruptions to the ozone layer by satellites, the UV reaching us may be higher than that of our ancestors 10,000 years ago. The air we breathe is higher in CO2 than it’s ever been, since humans evolved 300,000 years ago.
Most of us are overworked, under slept, or doing our best, but our skin bares it all. This year alone, I’ve been experiencing eczema of the hands, poison ivy, wasp stings, staph infections, and now, mosquito bites.
More than uncomfortable, skin ailments can be embarrassing. You want to cover up, hide until it’s over, and do everything you can to heal fast. The older I get, the more I notice the lines and creases of my face and neck, the patchwork of old freckles on my arms. It’s not enough that skin holds us together, it has to look good doing it, too - or else.
Spending as much time outside as I do, I have wondered how the rapid change in climate and chemistry of the air will affect the bodies of land workers today. I’ve long been warned (and scolded!) about my years of wearing nothing on my head but a baseball cap and sunglasses, no sunscreen or sleeves or long-legged pants. One year I was barefoot most of the time. I had a couple of crocs seasons before my heels split.
Lately, I’ve learned to honor the skin I’ve got a little more, probably because that’s what it has demanded of me. No longer can I work all day without gloves and/or moisturizer. I’m taking hints that my skin has been paying dues for a long time, and I need to stay hydrated. I need to keep up with my changing needs, as both the world and I change.
What is your seed to carry? What wonderful ways have you forgotten to honor your skin? What does our skin need in order to adapt to where we are now? Can we “skincare” our way through this? Sound off in the comments.
<3Farmer Rox<3
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2726374/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516109112#:~:text=Significance,via%20symbiosis%20with%20human%20cultivators.
https://botanistinthekitchen.blog/2024/11/27/squashes-demystified/#:~:text=Summer%20squash%20cultivars%E2%80%93especially%20the,occurred%20primarily%20in%20Europe%20subsequently.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-thawed-the-last-ice-age/
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ae24bb44736d4db3a6ac59e23f8eeabf
https://insider.si.edu/2015/11/dull-mastadon-taste-buds-once-helped-pumpkins-wild-ancestor-thrive/
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ae24bb44736d4db3a6ac59e23f8eeabf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8359960/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/satellite-mega-constellations-could-jeopardize-ozone-hole-recovery/#:~:text=It's%20in%20this%20fragile%20expanse,edition%20of%20Geophysical%20Research%20Letters.