Humans Cultured Cannabis 12,000 Years Ago For Food, Fibers

A new study traced back the origin of cannabis cultivation to nearly 12,000 years ago in East Asia, with the plant grown as a multipurpose crop, and it took humans 8,000 years to finally figure out that different strains of the weed could satisfy their demand for fiber, food and for intermittent “high,” Mihai Andrei reported for ZME Science last week.

Cannabis is one of the first plants to be domesticated by humans and archaeological studies have found traces of cannabis in different cultures even as scientists still could not pinpoint when and where exactly was cannabis domesticated.

Many botanists believed the plant emerged in central Asia, but a new study shows that east Asia (including parts of China) is the origin of domesticated cannabis, Andrei said. A research team was led by Luca Fumagalli of the University of Lausanne and involved scientists from Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Qatar, and Switzerland.

The researchers compared and analyzed 110 whole genomes of different plants, ranging from wild-growing feral plants and landraces to historical cultivars and modern hybrids.

They concluded that the ancestral domestication of cannabis plants occurred some 12,000 years ago, during the Neolithic and that the plants likely had multiple uses. Hemp strains bred for fiber production have mutations that inhibit branching, which makes them grow taller and produce more fibers.

Strains for drug production have mutations that spur branching and reduce vertical growth. This results in shorter plants that produce more flowers. In addition, plants grown for drug productions also have mutations that boost the production of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

Fumagalli was able to gather around 80 different types of cannabis plants, either cultivated by farmers or growing in the wild. They also included 30 previously sequenced genomes in the analysis. With this, they found that the likely ancestor of modern cannabis (the initial wild plant that was domesticated) is likely extinct.

However, its closest relatives survive in parts of northwestern China. The so-called Silk Road may as well have traded with cannabis and hashish, which was in demand in tribes in Central Asia and the Middle East.

“We show that Cannabis sativa was first domesticated in early Neolithic times in East Asia and that all current hemp and drug cultivars diverged from an ancestral gene pool currently represented by feral plants and landraces in China,” the study read.

“Our genomic dating suggests that early domesticated ancestors of hemp and drug types diverged from Basal cannabis [around 12,000 years ago] indicating that the species had already been domesticated by early Neolithic times,” the study added.

The results go against a popular theory regarding the plant’s origin, the researchers stressed. “Contrary to a widely-accepted view, which associates cannabis with a Central Asian center of crop domestication, our results are consistent with a single domestication origin of Cannabis sativa in East Asia, in line with early archaeological evidence,” they said.

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