On April 30th, Prof. Dong Guanghui’s review article, titled with “A new story for wheat into China” was published online on Nature Plants, an internationally renowned botanical journal. Prof. Dong, from the College of Earth Environment Sciences, LZU, made comments on Dr. Long Tengwen’s research paper, saying Long put forward the positive evidence that the wheat originated from West Asia was introduced into China in Longshan Period(about 2600 to 2000B.C). Moreover, Prof. Dong also remarked that this article offered a distinctive dispersal route of wheat, which provided a new thinking about the dispersal history of wheat in the early stage of China. Meanwhile, Prof. Dong argued that this hypothesis needed further proofs and the routes of wheat dispersal into China were full of possibilities, which would be provided more clues by future interdisciplinary research.
Wheat, one of the three most important crops on the planet, provides staple food for ~35% of global population. While West Asia is thought to be where wheat was initially domesticated, nowadays China produces the highest wheat yield in the world. This leads to a critical issue that has caused wide debate in archaeology for decades:
the timing and route of wheat dispersal into China. In this issue of Nature Plants, Long et al. report ten direct dates of carbonized wheat grains unearthed from the Longshan culture (~2600–2000 BCE) sites, in the lower Yellow River region, Yangtze River arguing that wheat had been introduced into China around 2600 BCE — around half a millennium earlier than previous estimates. The researchers also propose a new hypothesis for the early arrival and dispersal of the west-crop in China.
(Translated by Song Rong; Proofread by Li Rui; Edited by Sun Lianyue)
