High on the Tibetan Plateau , there ’s Qinghai Lake – the largest lake in all of China . Now , researchers believe this high - height region may be the origin of the cannabis plant . The study is publish in the journalVegetation chronicle and Archaeobotany .
The quest to discover the origins of cannabis has been a long , difficult process . One key issue is that a closely related grouping of plants calledHumulus(or hop ) shares a similar pollen shape toCannabisin the fossil record , make it difficult to identify between the two .
Due to this conundrum , John McPartland from the University of Vermont and confrere decided to approach the problem in a new mode . They assemble 155 fogy pollen studies and used other plants as a proxy to guess which genus the pollen belonged to . For example , some plant life only grow alongsideCannabisin the steppes , such asArtemisia , while others like tree pollen rise with hop . HumulusandCannabisare believed to have diverged some 27.8 million days ago , with the oldest fossil pollen name asCannabisfrom 19.6 million eld ago .
“ We bridged the worldly gap between the disagreement date and the oldest pollen by mapping the earliest appearance ofArtemisia , ” the squad wrote intheir newspaper . “ These datum converge on the northeastern Tibetan Plateau , which we infer as theCannabiscentre of origin , in the general vicinity of Qinghai Lake . ”
The squad believesCannabisremained focalize for meg of years in the gamey - altitude steppes of central Asia . It then spread first to Europe 6 million year ago , and then to Eastern China 1.2 million years ago . The firstCannabispollen appears in the Indian subcontinent over 32,000 eld ago , but the first archeological evidence for the plant life was found in Japan in 10,000 BCE .
While the study is intriguing , it is difficult to prove beyond any fairish doubt . The assumption is base onCannabis’habitat companion such asArtemisia , which might not be correct , and it ’s potential there was nameless cross - contaminant . What ’s certain is that when world diffuse around the world , Cannabisalso spread and was readily available for cultivation . Thanks to all its attribute , from textile to hallucinogenic , it is still cultivated today .
[ H / T : New Scientist ]
