Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 12, Issue 11, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0187405
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council [249642]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [41620104007, 41672171]
- National Social Science Foundation of China [11AZD116, 14ZDB052]
- University of Chinese Academy of Sciences [Y65201YY00]
- Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi, India [EMR/2015/000881]
- International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES)
- European Research Council (ERC) [249642] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Today, farmers in many regions of eastern Asia sow their barley grains in the spring and harvest them in the autumn of the same year (spring barley). However, when it was first domesticated in southwest Asia, barley was grown between the autumn and subsequent spring (winter barley), to complete their life cycles before the summer drought. The question of when the eastern barley shifted from the original winter habit to flexible growing schedules is of significance in terms of understanding its spread. This article investigates when barley cultivation dispersed from southwest Asia to regions of eastern Asia and how the eastern spring barley evolved in this context. We report 70 new radiocarbon measurements obtained directly from barley grains recovered from archaeological sites in eastern Eurasia. Our results indicate that the eastern dispersals of wheat and barley were distinct in both space and time. We infer that barley had been cultivated in a range of markedly contrasting environments by the second millennium BC. In this context, we consider the distribution of known haplotypes of a flowering-time gene in barley, Ppd-H1, and infer that the distributions of those haplotypes may reflect the early dispersal of barley. These patterns of dispersal resonate with the second and first millennia BC textual records documenting sowing and harvesting times for barley in central/eastern China.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available