Posted on 11/26/2017 3:45:54 PM PST by SunkenCiv
First domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, wheat and barley took vastly different routes to China, with barley switching from a winter to both a winter and summer crop during a thousand-year detour along the southern Tibetan Plateau, suggests new research... "Wheat was introduced to central China in the second or third millennium B.C., but barley did not arrive there until the first millennium B.C.," Liu said. "While previous research suggests wheat cultivation moved east along the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau, our study calls attention to the possibility of a southern route (via India and Tibet) for barley." Based on the radiocarbon analysis of 70 ancient barley grains recovered from archaeological sites in China, India, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, together with DNA and ancient textual evidence, the study tackles the mystery of why ancient Chinese farmers would change the seasonality of a barley crop that originated in a latitudinal range similar to their own. The answer, Liu explains, is that barley changed from a winter to summer crop during its passage to China...
(Excerpt) Read more at popular-archaeology.com ...
Map of Eurasia shows the oldest radiocarbon-measured dates (B.C.) for individual grains of barley recovered from each region. Wheat and barley arrived in South Asia about a millennium before they arrived in East Asia. Free-threshing wheats spread to China along a route to the north of the Tibetan Plateau. Naked barley is likely to have been introduced to China via southern highland routes that remain to be identified. Image: Courtesy of PLOS One
Thank you for posting this SunkenCiv, but when I clicked the link to read more, it doesn’t work for me. Can you verify it?
I love barley
Beef and Barley soup...one of my favorites!
Yum!
I’m trying to think of more things I can do with barley because I really love the chewy texture. Replacing rice with it doesn’t really work. There is a barley stroganoff recipe I make with ground beef and sour cream that’s pretty good.
Y’kbnow, I had the same problem, should have warned everyone. Kept getting “Connection timed out”.
Here’s the link:
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2017/article/ancient-barley-took-high-road-to-china
Here’s the site I used (and I’ve been having to use it a lot, because my browser and OS are elderly, and the liberals who run everything are ageist pigs):
That yields this link:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fall-2017/article/ancient-barley-took-high-road-to-china
Interestingly enough, usually there are no pictures in the cached pages, but this time I got nice pics on the Roman shipwrecks story, uh, that I’ve not posted yet. :^)
I love the “Kamut” cereal, I forget which brand, get it once in a while at the health food store, there used to be a nice ice cream parlor near there — but there’s a “President’s Choice” cereal (New York state store brand) callled, if memory serves, Ancient Grains, that got me started on that.
Oh, okay, it’s a Canadian brand... but honestly, I used to pick that up at either Tops (None-too) Friendly Markets, or Wegman’s, when visiting out of state. For a time, the local small chain D&W had to get a new wholesale source, and we were actually getting President’s Choice products here, but that didn’t last, they finally sold out to Spartan.
I very much like the concept of a stroganoff using barley...I might just try that!
Interesting, I wouldn’t have thought that a few hundreds of years would be enough to hybridize a strain to growing in a colder climate, but...I admit I don’t have enough knowledge of that kind of thing to know any better!
Thanks for that link...
You’ll like it! The recipe I used is pretty simple, just ground beef, thyme and margoram - ?,onion, cooked barley, and then sour cream added last.
My late mother loved Campbell’s Scotch Broth——because of the barley.
.
Substitute cooked barley for Chinese Fried Rice. Yum! And great texture.
Now that’s a good idea. I always thought white rice had a hard time standing up to the tastes and textures in fried rice.
The cultivated grains that produce larger, better, or more easily harvested seed got disproprotionately selected by the farmers, year after year, and the local climates screened out nonviable variants. :^)
Heh, I guess when I think of it that way...it is entirely possible...after all, that hybridization has been done intentionally for a long time...just wasn’t thinking of it that way.
I was thinking of a natural process!
This is Unnatural selection. :^)
That's a phrase now?
Because of the Selleck movie?
No, I think it happened because of that Robert Burns biopic.
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