Talk:Domestication

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Discussion for: Domestication • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Domestication covers how Cannabis sativa became a crop: how wild, feral and cultivated plants differ, the older ideas of where the crop began, the genome studies, the dated fruits, fibres and pollen, and the divergence of hemp and drug types. Where the genus itself evolved, and the idea of a centre of origin in general, belong to Centre of origin. Each excavated site has a page of its own.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

Ren and colleagues (2021), Science Advances 7: eabg2286: whole genomes of 110 accessions, the four groups, the East Asian origin, the date of about 12,000 years before present with its 95% confidence interval of 6,458 to 15,728 years, the stage at about 4,000 years and the multipurpose-crop proposal.
Balant and colleagues (2025), Plants, People, Planet 7: 1771–1788; Halpin-McCormick and colleagues (2024), Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 71: 4705–4722; Zhang and colleagues (2018), Frontiers in Plant Science 9: 1876: genetic studies that group the plants differently or doubt the sampling.
Kovalchuk and colleagues (2020), Annual Review of Plant Biology 71: 713–739; Lynch and colleagues (2025), Nature: reviews and a pangenome study on sampling and on wild relatives.
Kobayashi and colleagues (2008) and Kudo and colleagues (2009), Japanese Journal of Historical Botany 16 and 17, in Japanese with English abstracts: the Okinoshima fruits and their direct radiocarbon date.
Dal Martello and colleagues (2024), Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 33: 503–518: the limits of pollen and impressions, the reading of the Okinoshima fruits as domesticated, and Haimenkou.
Long and colleagues (2017), McPartland, Hegman and Long (2019), McPartland, Guy and Hegman (2018) and McPartland and Hegman (2018), all in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany: syntheses of pollen and archaeological finds in Asia and Europe.
Rull (2022), Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution and Systematics 55: 125670: the European and Asian estimates compared.
McPartland and Small (2020), PhytoKeys 144: 81–112; McPartland (2018), Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research 3: 203–212; Small (2015), Botanical Review 81: 189–294; Clarke and Merlin (2016), Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 35: 293–327: wild and feral plants, the drug domesticates and degrees of domestication.
Vavilov (1926), Центры происхождения культурных растений, ch. 5, pp. 107–121, in Russian: the wild and cultivated fruits, the weedy origin of the crop and the Altai. De Candolle, Origin of Cultivated Plants (English translation, preface of 1882), the section on hemp: where hemp grew wild, and the Scythians.
Ren and colleagues (2019), Science Advances 5: eaaw1391: the Jirzankal braziers.

Source discrepancies

The Okinoshima date in later reviews. Kudo and colleagues measured the fruits at 8955 ± 45 radiocarbon years before present and gave the calibrated date as about 10,000 cal BP. Dal Martello and colleagues give the same measurement as 8280–7660 BCE in their text and as 8260–7990 BCE in their Table 3. McPartland and Small give 8000 cal BCE. The abstract of McPartland, Hegman and Long (2019) says "10,000 bce", while their own table gives 10,000 BP. Ofosu-Brakoh and colleagues (2025) date the fruits to 6,000–5,220 cal BP and cite Kudo and colleagues for it, whose paper gives no such range.
Ren and colleagues' date in later reviews. Xie and colleagues (2023, Horticulture Research) report the result as domestication "during the early Neogene"; Ren and colleagues wrote "early Neolithic". Rull (2022) reports that some authors placed domestication in Central Asia "by 12,000 BCE (ca. 10,000 yr BP)", after Warf (2014); the two figures in that phrase are about 2,000 years apart.
The stage at about 4,000 years. The main text of Ren and colleagues gives no confidence interval for it.
Pottery and seeds in Ren and colleagues. Their sentence linking the date to cord-impressed pottery of 12,000 years ago from South China and Taiwan, and to seeds of 10,000 years ago from Japan, names no site and cites no excavation report. McPartland and Small, and Dal Martello and colleagues, treat hemp identified from impressions as subjective or problematic.
Zhang and colleagues on India. Osterberger and colleagues (2021) write that Zhang and colleagues placed the origin in "a low latitude region of India". Zhang and colleagues name India only as the guess of Linnaeus in 1737.
Large early grains from China. Dal Martello and colleagues mean the grains from Zhuzhai, in the Middle Yellow River region, which they date to about 5900–5800 BC after Bestel and colleagues (2018). They read the grains' size as a sign of "possible cultivation".
Vavilov's centres. Vavilov's 1926 chapter on hemp names no country where the crop began. The two centres he gave for Cannabis indica in 1935 are reported by McPartland and Small.

Terms

Feral plants grow outside cultivation but descend from crops; wild plants have never been cultivated. Several of the sources hold that the two cannot yet be told apart in the field.
Basal cannabis is Ren and colleagues' name for their group of Chinese feral plants and landraces at the base of their family tree.
Years before present count back from 1950. Radiocarbon years and calibrated years are given as each source gives them.

Images

File:Cannabis-domestication-study-estimates.svg (lead, in the series box). Above, a map with three shaded regions, each labelled with its study: East Asia (Ren and colleagues 2021), Europe (McPartland and colleagues 2018), and South and Central Asia for the drug domesticates (McPartland and Small 2020). Below, a timeline in years before present: Ren and colleagues' point at about 12,000 with a bar for its 95% interval from 15,728 to 6,458, their stage at about 4,000, and Rull's European range of 7,000 to 5,000. No arrows and no single point of origin. The shaded areas are drawn for this wiki to show the regions the studies name; none of the studies gives a boundary.