Cannabis Was Domesticated In East Asia, According To New Study

By sequencing the plant’s genetic samples, they found that the species was most likely domesticated during the early Neolithic. They said their conclusions are supported by pottery and other archaeological evidence from the same period discovered in present-day China, Japan and Taiwan.

But Professor Purugganan said he was skeptical of the conclusions that the plant was developed for drug or fiber use 12,000 years ago, as archaeological evidence shows that cannabis was used consistently for these purposes, or that its existence began around 7,500 years ago.

“I would like to see a much larger study with a larger sample,” he said.

Luca Fumagalli, a Swiss biologist who specializes in conservation genetics and author of the study, said the theory, which originated in Central Asia, is largely based on observational data from wild specimens in that region.

Dr. “Wild specimens are easy to find, but these are not wild species,” Fumagalli said. “These are plants that have escaped captivity and re-adapted to the wild environment.”

“By the way, that’s why you call it weed, because it grows everywhere,” he added.

The study was led by Ren Guangpeng, a botanist at Lanzhou University in western China’s Gansu province. Dr. Ren said in an interview that the original place where cannabis was domesticated was most likely northwest China, and that the finding could aid current efforts to breed new cannabis strains in the country.

To conduct the study, Dr. Ren and colleagues collected 82 specimens, either seeds or leaves, from around the world. Samples included strains selected for fiber production and others from Europe and North America bred to produce high amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant’s most mood-altering compound.

Dr. Fumagalli and colleagues then extracted genomic DNA from the samples and sequenced them in a lab in Switzerland. They also downloaded and reanalyzed sequencing data from 28 other samples. The results showed that the wild varieties they analyzed were in fact “historical escapes from domesticated forms,” ​​and that the current strains in China – cultured and wild – were the closest descendants of the ancestral gene pool.