Many of us have wondered to ourselves at some point about the origin of hemp.  This valuable plant has been an agricultural star for almost as long as cereal grains!  Ibn Waḥshiyya, a 10th-century scholar from Kufa (modern day Iraq) speculated that hemp had arrived in his region via India or China.  A group of researchers including John M. McPartland, William Hegman and Tengwen Long have authored a paper claiming to have pinpointed the most likely place for the birthplace of hemp once and for all.  To solve the mystery, the researchers had to peer deep into the past by analyzing data from 155 fossil pollen studies.  They focused on a few specific plant pollens that also correlate with C. Sativa.  

    C. Sativa and common Hops are related species that diverged ~27.8 million years ago from a common ancestor.  The earliest known pollen grains from C. Sativa date to ~19.6 million years ago and were found in northwestern China.  Does that mean the mystery is solved?  Is northwestern China the birthplace of hemp?  Not so fast, say the study authors.  They claim that the several million year gap between the divergence of hemp from hops and the first known pollen can be filled in with the help of some 420-friendly Artemisia pollen.  It turns out that Artemisia loves to cohabitate with hemp and by filling in the fossil history gaps with Artemisia as a proxy along with some geological sleuthing the study authors were able to pin-point the origin of hemp as the northeastern Tibetan Plateau near Qinghai Lake.  

So what even happened in the first place?  Why did hemp and hops go their separate ways in times long past?  The researchers think they may have found some clues in the course of their study.  It appears that hemp diverged within an aridification zone mapped by Bosboom et al. (2011).  Hops is not known to be well suited to open, arid environments and perhaps its most recent common ancestor with hemp wasn’t, either.  The Tibetan Plateau lies within this aridification zone.  

So that solves that, all’s well that ends well, but if hemp originated on the Tibetan Plateau how did it get…everywhere else?  The researchers believe they can tell us when, if not how.  According to their analysis, hemp first spread west into Russia and Europe by 6 million years ago and then east into China by 1.2 million years ago.  The first hemp pollen to appear in India did so close to 33,000 years ago.

The rest is, as they say, history.

You can read the paper here

Tell us what you think in the comments below!

1. McPartland, J.M., Hegman, W. & Long, T. Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on a synthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies. Veget Hist Archaeobot 28, 691–702 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-019-00731-8

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