A Chinese study on bread wheat DNA shows that the initial homeland of domesticated wheat was in South West of Caspian. This is the Chinese way to pinpoint the region of historic Armenia. Large number of wheat specimens were taken from Turkey also from South Caucasus, Iran and Iraq.
Hundred years ago the Russian scientist Vavilov proposed the same theory. Over time others also noted that scenario and now genetics proves it correct.
The oldest sites were farming started are near the Diyarbekir/Portasar/Gobekle tepe region, so it's not surprising that the wheat used there was from the neighbourhood.
Prior that another DNA paper has found a similar result for the barley.
Notice rice and millet were domesticated in China but not the wheat which was introduced there by Steppe pastoralists.
-----------
Abstract
Deep knowledge of crop biodiversity is essential to improving global food security. Despite bread wheat serving as a keystone crop worldwide, the population history of bread wheat and its relatives, both cultivated and wild, remains elusive. By analysing whole-genome sequences of 795 wheat accessions, we found that bread wheat originated from the southwest coast of the Caspian Sea and underwent a slow speciation process, lasting ~3,300 yr owing to persistent gene flow from its relatives. Soon after, bread wheat spread across Eurasia and reached Europe, South Asia and East Asia ~7,000 to ~5,000 yr ago, shaping a diversified but occasionally convergent adaptive landscape in novel environments. By contrast, the cultivated relatives of bread wheat experienced a population decline by ~82% over the past ~2,000 yr due to the food choice shift of humans. Further biogeographical modelling predicted a continued population shrinking of many bread wheat relatives in the coming decades because of their vulnerability to the changing climate. These findings will guide future efforts in protecting and utilizing wheat biodiversity to enhance global wheat production.
No comments:
Post a Comment