The Origin Of Cannabis

[White Beard]

I‘ve found this thread very interesting

I will say right up front that I consider this current trend to run spot-instances of prehistoric cannabis through a Ouija Board in an effort to...well, see, I’m not sure WHY the screaming need to play Cool Story Bro with the imaginary history of cannabis.

The papers and citations and so forth obscures some crucial facts. One of this facts is that there is no basis for the construction of a timeline of cannabis from the few ancient instances recovered in the field. Yes, no basis.

There is frankly nothing to suggest that cannabis *began* anywhere; we might as well try to determine where grass (the other kind, of which bamboo is one) came from. The recovered samples are literally all over the map, in time as well as in space. Nothing like them other than the plant-matter samples themselves, each of which is, from a research standpoint, free-standing and therefore unique. Consequently, no amount of storytelling about how and where stands on any basis.

Since all storytelling on the topic stands at about the same level of reliability, maybe I can entertain with my own.

It has nothing to do with aliens. Sorry, I’m indifferent on the subject of aliens. Occam’s razor most definitely applies to aliens. But it does have to do with floods, in a sense.

The talk earlier about floods is pretty well-founded, but aside from Jehovah and “crustal displacement” there’s really only one serious possibility: one or more extraterrestrial bodies striking the earth.

Given the general coalescence of academic opinion that there are no reliable dates for human presence before 9000BCE, and the now-general knowledge that there are remains of civilizations that don’t fit with our birth of history point 11,000 years ago (Tiahuanaco in the Andes, the trilithon @Baalbek), it makes sense to look for possible events that could have disrupted the evolution of culture in so complete a fashion, and for a long enough time.

The extraterrestrial impact scenario has now been largely proven by the discovery and verification of an impact crater under the Greenland ice sheet, reliably dated to 12,900 years ago. A secondary impact site is under investigation in Michigan, and it is suggested that the invading body may have broken up, with most landing in ocean.

How would this add up to a flood of world proportions? First, by being several impacts in water, creating huge waves. Second, by way of kinetic conversion.

To get a sense of what I mean by kinetic conversion, consider this crater, now called the Hiawatha crater, and the Younger Dryas Impact Event: the crater is 19 miles in diameter, and at the time of the impact, beneath some 5 miles of ice. Given estimates of the incoming speed and the composition (iron), scientists are estimating the impact to have *vaporized* between 500,000 and 5,000,000 cubic *miles* of ice instantly, to have started huge fires, and having thrown enormous quantities of dust, ash, and vaporized rock into the atmosphere along a with a double shit-ton of water vapor. Now add in changes to atmospheric gasses and a whole lot more ash resulting from increased volcanism in response.

All this adds up to a planet shrouded in clouds.

Needless to say, it rained. A lot. For a long damn time. The cooling that resulted from the thick mass of clouds may have lasted a thousand years before a new equilibrium was established. It brought the Ice Age back, and it raised sea level some 30-40 meters very quickly.

Take a look at a map of the world. Where are the highest concentrations of people? Along the coasts, along the rivers, in lowlands where the farming is easy and good. A sudden rise in sea level would have either ruined or inundated the bulk of human civilization in a few decades.

Surviving populations would have been remote, and suddenly bereft of whatever aspects of civilization weren’t already practiced in those areas.

Further corroboration: large areas of submerged buildings, approximating what we think of as cities have been found under some 400 feet of water off the coasts of India.

The complexity of the cannabis genome and component unique compounds, not unlike ginseng, suggests that cannabis was well familiar to the world that drowned, and had perhaps gone through multiple periods of breeding to emphasize the various desirable traits.

Everything so far is supported by current science, and stands a better chance of according with the known facts than our current guessing game regarding the “timeline of human-cannabis interaction”.

I don’t know what the agenda is behind upending of the cannabis taxonomy, but it’s pretty clear that there IS one.

Anyway, there’s my two cents...

 

[englishrick]

How does everyone feel about this

 

[White Beard]

Some questions?

If Cannabis is a genus, what other members are there?

It makes no sense to distinguish between cannabis sativa and other cannabis if there are no other cannabis species to require the clarification. And of course, if they can interbreed, they are the same species, QED.

In the first image, we scramble things ‘cause fun, I guess? Switching the names around doesn’t help anything, does it?

Example: cannabis is famous for two things other than the effects of the resin - paper, and rope. The rope comes from fiber, the *longer* the better; the paper comes from the pith, also called hurds. To look at the first image, one wonders why the fiber plant is the shortest...as for which of the three varietals is the best for paper, this scheme is no help at all.

This is a serious question: is there some pressing reason to credit this merry-go-wrong? I understand there are people with names involved, but what is supposed to accomplish? It certainly doesn’t seem to straighten anything out.

 

[Blind Joe Death]

And of course, if they can interbreed, they are the same species, QED.

This does not actually hold true and, although, I think our understanding of a species isnt entirely correct. Species do cross pollinate. That is what a hybrid is. And there are many examples of natural hybrids in the wild. Species diverge from isolation from the outlying population. You probably are a hybrid of at least Neanderthal and Homosapian, possibly a small proportion of other Homininds.You have your Immune System because of them.

 

[Ganja 13]

Hops is closely related to cannabis, but no one has been able to hybridize the two

 

[xxPeacePipexx]

Hops is closely related to cannabis, but no one has been able to hybridize the two

Correct even though they can be grafted, they don't mix like the ligers and donkeys' and other hybrids.

 

[therevverend]

It makes no sense to distinguish between cannabis sativa and other cannabis if there are no other cannabis species to require the clarification. And of course, if they can interbreed, they are the same species, QED.

You bring up some good stuff here. Taxonomic classifications aren't as tight as it seems like they would be. Biologists can use their own discretion, based on their knowledge and past precedent, to decide what Family, Genus, and Species an organism belongs to. Interbreeding doesn't play into this. For instance the American Bison, Bison Bison, can interbreed with regular old domestic cattle, Bos Taurus Taurus, to make Beefalo. They aren't even in the same genus let alone species. As a side note how long has it been since I've heard a farmer calling his cattle, 'Come boss, come boss'? When I was a kid I didn't know that Bos was another name for cows.

How does everyone feel about this

To look at the first image, one wonders why the fiber plant is the shortest...as for which of the three varietals is the best for paper, this scheme is no help at al

I think it's an inside joke McPartland is making as part of his presentation. Not meant to be 100% accurate you'd probably have to be there. The drawings of the 'Sativa, Indica, and ruderalis' used to be in every grow book, from the 1960s to the 2000's, to teach growers the difference between 'the three recognized species' of cannabis. For most of us when we started growing that was our understanding of cannabis.

Recent evidence has found that what was once considered Sativa Ruderalis is not a separate species but part of the larger hemp species. Sativa Sativa or if you wanted to split it you could call it Sativa Sativa Ruderalis. Now that botanists are allowed to study it they've found that most of what was thought was Ruderalis is just feral hemp. It no longer grows big and stretchy because it can reproduce better in the wild by staying small and Autoflowering.

So McPartland is making a joke of that showing how far our knowledge has come. During the Drug War most of the good work on cannabis botany was done by Russians and Eastern Europeans. Now their research is seeing the light of day plus it's fashionable at your local liberal arts college to do a study on the diffusion of hemp across Europe in the early Holocene for instance. Plus the DNA and archaeobotanical evidence is taking off. The same way de-criminalization has effected cannabis growing and marketing it's effecting the botany and history aspect.

Recently I made a post in a different thread about why equatorial drug strains are not Sativas, they are properly called Cannabis Indica. How the screw up happened. I'll drag it back here and post it again because it's relevant to this stuff and should explain a bit more about McPartland's graphic.

 

[therevverend]

In 1785 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a description of the second type of cannabis, Cannabis Indica. Carl Linnaeus had documented the first type, Cannabis sativa, in 1753. Cannabis Sativa was the type Europeans were familiar with, hemp for textiles that doesn't get you high. (We can debate whether these are different enough to separate them at the species level, I think they're similar enough it should be Cannabis Sativa Sativa and Cannabis Sativa Indica but let's leave that to biologists to argue over.)

Lamarck was describing the type of cannabis that was different to Europeans, the drug type that grew in India that gets you high. He described a female type NLD (narrow leaf drug) variety with sparse, wispy, elongated buds. When you see bottles of cannabis tincture from the 19th and early 20th century labeled 'Cannabis Indica' this is not Afghani cannabis. It is from NLDs.

The Russians Vavilov and Bukinich in 1929 first reported the occurance of the Afghani type of broad leaf drug type (BLD). Vavilov included two BLD types from Pakistan and Afghanistan as subspecies of Cannabis Indica, named Cannabis Indica Afghanica. He was lumping BLDs together with NLDs in the same category, saying Sativas and Indicas are together because they're both drug types of cannabis. He could have called it Cannabis Afghanica separating it from the other drug types.

In 1972 Richard Howard Schultes traveled to Afghanistan specifically to obtain samples of the then little-known hashish cultivars. This makes me think Afghani strains and definitely Afghani hashish had come to the attention of some Americans. This was why Schultes, a botanist who documented ethnogens, was interested in documenting the plants.

Schultes followed Vavilov in using a broad definition of Cannabis Indica including all the drug cannabis, both NLDs and WLDs. Schultes interpreted Cannabis Indica as the ancestor of all NLD strains worldwide. This may or may not be true, NLDs may have traveled from China in the east through the Himalayas to India where they evolved into a new category in the Hindu Kush. Schultes' conclusion was pretty good at the time before DNA evidence.

Schultes chose and described a very short squat profusely branched WLD plant as the type specimen of Cannabis Indica. I'm looking at a picture of it, it's about 3 feet tall and growing in a sandy wasteland. Schultes in down on one knee so he can get a look at it. It had dark green leaves. One of the most extreme Indica types I've seen and hard to believe it's growing at all. Any water is going to get sucked into that sand it must have been extremely drought tolerant.

This is how he confused every pot grower since 1974, he used Lamarck's name Cannabis Indica to correctly identify the hashplants but he incorrectly used it without the subspecies monker, Cannabis Indica Afghanica. He should not have chose his BLD as his type specimen, he should have stuck with Lamarck's or used a NLD from India.

Lamarck had named Indian drug types Cannabis Indica without knowing about Afghani BLDs but in 1976 two other biologists (Small and Cronquist) mistakenly lumped C. Indica NLD from India together with C. Sativa (European Hemp) because they all have narrow leaves. They also didn't view any BLD specimens so they left those out entirely!

Since then other biologists have also fucked up, calling NLD hemp types originating in Eurasia Indicas, WLD types Cannabis Afghanicas creating a bigger more confusing mess for people who are already pretty stoned. Then Ruderalis came along, which is basically a dwarf version of Cannabis Sativa (narrow leaf Euro hemp) which some people erroneously thought was a 3rd species of cannabis, Cannabis Ruderals.

Some of this stuff should be a sticky because we come back to it so often.

 

[djonkoman]

personally I think it makes most sense to just call it 1 species.
the socalled subspecies easily interbreed, they look very much alike(my father grew some hemp to feed his goats, I think it was USO31, besides all plants being herms they very much look like weedplants. a bit lankier due to selection for fibers, but not so different I'd call it a different species, if I didn't know they were a fiberstrain I probably would just think they're weed).
especially with the drugtypes there is also so much interbreeding you can barely speak of seperate populations/genepools, and seperating indica, but grouping sativas from america, africa and asia all together seems silly to me. if you're set on calling them subspecies, thanm I think sativas from different continents should also be different subspecies.

you could make a good argument for seperating hemp and drug cannabis, since they are selected for very different traits, and not much crossing between them happens(at least, not conscieusly bred by humans, except the few people doing things like crosses to finola). (although, that is considering european hemp, and ignoring for example dual purpose strains from the himalya)

however, I think those traits are mostly human selection, so I think it makes more sense to treat them like the cultivargroups in brassica oleracea(cabbage, brocolli, kale etc) if you want to subdivide them, not as subspecies.

personally I'll just call them cannabis sativa though, and if it's relevant in the context I'll mention weed/drug or hemp.
in casual conversation I'll just use the classic indica/sativa(but not as overall strict, rigid categories, I use them mostly in the context of describing the high), but if I have enough time and my conversation partner doesn't seem bored yet I'll go on a long rant explaining indica/sativa is not such a clear cut division.
in the end I think it's best to just describe individual traits of a plant/strain and forget about the indica and sativa stuff, but you don't always get an hour to explain all the traits of a homebred cross.

 

[Pepé The Grower]

@ therevverend:

Great post!

Only part where i disagree is saying european hemp ain't psychoactive. It may be true nowadays, but if one looks hard enough there is hint of evidences going the other way back then.

I think political powers (mainly the church) worked very hard to suppress plants knowledge among regular peeps (witch hunting or inquisition), because those peeps were threatening their influence over the masses. Which lead us to beleive wrongly that there is/was less magic plants in EU vs America, and also suppressed some of the old hemp knowledge.

 

[White Beard]

Scattergun responses (sorry):

If McPartland was making a joke during a presentation, then the JOKE would have been shared and popularized, not the new graphic. Scientists are often funny folks, but there’s rarely a stitch of humor in scientific papers.

I can be totally wrong about this, but I’ve been under the impression that the purpose of taxonomy was to clearly identify the named organism, and to accurately describe it. That doesn’t seem to be the purpose of Clarke’s efforts to reclassify all “drug cultivars” as Indica. To my mind, it clarifies nothing, and in fact throws plant identification into uncertainty.

It’s true that sometimes genuinely distinct species (or subspecies) can produce offspring...but these are rare events, and the offspring, if not stillborn, is typically sterile. This implies, for example, that sapiens, neanderthalis, and denisova are similar enough to produce true-breeding lines in sufficient numbers to create a durable compound line, Sapiens sapiens. Which can only mean (barring alien interventions) that the three were not different enough to affect reproduction.

One of the distinctive features of cannabis, to me, has always been its extreme malleability: that is, the character and products of the plant are determined by cultivation to an extraordinary degree. For example, if you go by old photos, cannabis grown for fiber and perhaps seed were sown thickly, the shoots crowded each other for space and light and so grew tall with minimal branching, with a large seed head. Likewise, between our control of light intensity and other environmental manipulations, and even extreme physical manipulations of the plants themselves, we can produce an extreme of flower production and output of resinous products practically impossible in the wild.

Avid and minute observation of the growth of individual plants ‘in captivity’ by hundreds(?) of growers through thousands(?) of generations have borne out the observed distinctions between “sativa” and “indica”.

If one really wanted clear taxonomy, then ‘sativa’ should denote long internode length, and ‘indica’ denote short internode length, and take the measure of each varietal’s observed character, and go from there.

This all smells more of business than science to me. Are drug laws so written that everything specifies “sativa”, and with “hemp” now quasi-legal, do they want to RE-define cannabis so that they can claim the laws only apply to “hemp” (and thereby sell the idea that ‘no, no - we’re smoking indica, perfectly legal, good night, officer’)?

 

[therevverend]

That doesn’t seem to be the purpose of Clarke’s efforts to reclassify all “drug cultivars” as Indica.

Drug cultivars have always been classified as one of the two types of cannabis. This has been recognized since the 18th century. It makes sense botanically and genetically. The two lines split anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 years ago. I'd go with the older figure, there was likely one type during the last interglacial, the ice age split cannabis between two warmer places. One near the Caucasus Mountains and one in the east, in eastern China.

The idea that Afghani cannabis is it's own separate type was a mistake made by misinterpreting Schultes findings. This was compounded by the other two botanists who grouped narrow leaf drug cannabis with hemp, on the grounds they both had narrow leaves.

How separate you want to make these two types, if you want to call it Cannabis Sativa Indica or Cannabis Indica is up to the botanists to decide. There's good arguments to be made both ways.

 

[White Beard]

I can tell I still don’t understand...it sounds to me like there’s no way to distinguish between ‘drug’ and ‘non-drug’ without genetic tests, the way this new scheme mixes basic morphology to re-apply existing terms in novel and confusing ways.

If in fact you can’t tell hemp from sativa from indica based on morphology or growth habit, then how is it of any use to growers and users?

I appreciate y’all’s patience with my thinking out loud...this has been in my mind since I became aware of the new scheme

 

[therevverend]

No White Beard, the questions and skepticism are good, it helps me get it straight in my head. A lot of it is new to me, the genetic stuff especially. One example, Clarke and a lot of people, at least since the 70s, have thought Afghanis were the ancestors of all drug cannabis. As Eurasian hemp spread south it evolved into potent tropical cannabis, Afghani would be the ancestor of all drug cannabis.

It's looking more likely that drug cannabis spread south from China, around the Eastern Himalayas. As it spread north again into Pakistan and Afghanistan it may have hybridized with the narrow leaf hemp to make the wide leaf Afghani hashplants. It's also possible that cannabis was in the Himalayas, in India, much earlier then everyone thought.

Another thing I've realized from this write-up, how short of a time Westerners have known about Afghan varieties. The Russians 'discovered' them in the 1930s but Schultes brought them to the West in 1972. We were smoking Afghani hashish before we identified the plants it came from! It's understandable mistakes were made. One of the best reasons to argue that Afghans were a new species, it made possible the argument that Sativa was illegal but Indicas weren't. Also the drug war hysteria that there was this skunky new super potent extra addictive type of marijuana creeping it's way West out of the mysterious bazaars of Central Asia.

If in fact you can’t tell hemp from sativa from indica based on morphology or growth habit, then how is it of any use to growers and users?

I've been thinking about that too, a lot of it comes down to the genetic plasticity of cannabis. How quickly it adapts to new conditions. It's been reported for a long time now, that if you let hemp plants go feral in a tropical setting the CBD amounts will drop and the THC will rise. The opposite occurs if you try to grow an equatorial strain in the north. The THC potency drops and the CBD level rises.

There are drug strains that were bred from Eurasian hemp, and fiber and seed strains bred from eastern drug strains. Strains that have medium amounts of THC, 10%, and moderate amounts of CBD 1-5%, are likely either descended from Eurasian hemp or hybrids of hemp and Indica. I'm thinking Lebanese and Turkish strains are examples of drug strains with quite a bit of hemp genetics.

It's also possible that what makes Afghani hashplants unique is that they're hybrids between Indian and Eurasian cannabis. I'm curious about the narrow leaved Central Asian cannabis strains. The famous hashish from Uzbekistan and Chinese Turkestan mostly came from narrow leaf drug types. I'm curious what genetic testing will tell us about them and why they're so rare in the West. I'd think drug strains from the region would be early flowering, always a useful trait. A strain hunting trip to Kashgar might be a good idea.

Chinese, Korean, and Japanese hemp strains are Cannabis Indica, Cannabis Indica Chinensis. These have wide leaves, look like Afghani plants. low to medium CBD, low to very low THC. They throw a screwball into the simple narrow leaf/wide leaf classification but it makes sense from the idea that northern strains lose their potency and are useful as hemp and seed strains.

Clarke mentions SW China, the Hengduan-Yungui region, as an area Cannabis Indica may have emerged from at the end of the last ice age. He says there are many diverse phenotypes found there, both cultivated and feral. Resembling narrow leaf drug, broad leaf Chinese hemp, and broad leaf drug. Ace has a broad leaf Yunnan variety. I've seen the same thing reported from Iran, another candidate for a cannabis Ice Age refuge. I've seen wide leaf, narrow leaf, hemp, Indica, seed, all sorts of phenotypes from Iran both feral and cultivated. In the same region. Some of the pictures looked like Autoflowering Ruderalis types and set seed in August.

I'd like to go over the other categories and phenotypes:

Early flowering/Autoflowering, very low THC, low to moderate CBD: narrow leaf Eurasian hemp, Cannabis Sativa Sativa, feral or wild Autoflowering Eurasian cannabis, Cannabis Sativa Spontanea (formerly Cannabis Rudrealis-probable ancestor of all Eurasian hemp), narrow leaf American hemp varieties, Cannabis Sativa Americana.

medium to long flowering tropical types, all high THC: Cannabis Indica (from India and SE Asia) Cannabis Indica Mexicana, Cannabis Indica Africana, Cannabis Indica Indochinensis.

I'm going to have to finish this another time. I keep learning new stuff and it keeps getting longer and longer. I just read that Cannabis Sativa, Eurasian hemp varieties, are much more genetically diverse then Cannabis Indica, drug varieties. It show the drug strains possibly had a genetic bottleneck, meaning someone culled out a lot of the diversity early on. Heavy selection for drug traits most likely.

 

[White Beard]

The more I read and study on this, and the more I think about it, the more annoying things occur to me.

I have Clarke’s book on cannabis botany, but is been a LONG time since I read it last. The entire argument for his alternate taxonomy is based on a story he’s working out...a story he presents as true, without any evidence I can see beyond the story. Unfamiliar with McPartland’s work, but what I’ve seen strikes me as highly speculative, and between him and Clarke, all probabilities are assessed from the assumption that the taxonomy is *wrong* and the Indica theory is *right*.

I distrust arguments based on a preconceived notion; it’s disruptive of fact to only value data that support our pet notions. If the scheme *clarified and corrected* the taxonomy, I’ll bet we could all see it, instead of things becoming murkier.

The only agenda I have with this is I want it to make more sense than what it wants to replace. I don’t even have preconceived ideas of what that would look like.

Thanks, revver, plenty of meat to chew on!

 

[therevverend]

The entire argument for his alternate taxonomy is based on a story he’s working out...a story he presents as true, without any evidence I can see beyond the story.

No, no no. There's not an alternative taxonomy and it's not something new Clarke has come up with. Since the 18th century botanists have recognized two genus, species, sub-species, type, lines, whatever you want to call it. Temperate Eurasian hemp and everything else. Cannabis Sativa and Cannabis Indica. Nobody disputes this, there is no 'alternative' or whatever.

When Vavilov 'discovered' Cannabis Indica Afghanica he didn't classify it as a new 'species' or 'subspecies'. He classifed it as another type of drug cannabis. A very special type that's different then all the other drug types but still closer to Cannabis Indica, the drug type that grows in India then Cannabis Sativa, narrow leaf Eurasian hemp.

Then when Schultes made his way from Harvard to Afghanistan in the early 70s he documented the same thing Vavilov did. The wide leaf cannabis was a drug type of cannabis classified under Cannabis Indica, cannabis high in THC. Only instead of using an Indian strain as his type specimen he used an Afghani wide leaf plant. This is what's confused everyone.

There isn't anyone who supports the idea that all wide leaf and narrow leaf cannabis besides Afghani cannabis are one type, and Afghani type cannabis is the second type of cannabis. There's no alternative idea, it doesn't exist. If you had hemp mixed in with your drug plants you'd understand why drug types are different from temperate hemp types.

The genetic evidence supports this, that the Eurasian hemp line split from the eastern Himalayan line of cannabis at least 10,000 years ago.

Whether this is relevant to us growers, I managed to grow and breed perfectly good cannabis for most of my life without understanding this stuff. Whether Indica is a seperate species or sub-species doesn't make any difference whatsoever, the important part is that it produces flowers, I can add pollen and create seeds.

However knowing that Indica is 'just another, albeit eccentric, drug type' is important to me as a breeder in one way. The wide leaf trait. I'll be looking at pictures and someone will make a claim, this plant is Columbian or Thai or Nepalese or Mexican or whatever. Someone else will say, 'No way! The leaves are much too wide! It's a hybrid!'

WIDE LEAVES ALONE DO NOT INDICATE A STRAIN'S ORIGIN. Wide leaves do tend to dominate in Afghan hybrids but selection can also cause a strain to quickly gain the trait. I've grown quite a few 'pure Sativa' types with leaves that were just as wide as Afghan hybrids. I've also grown Indica dominate hybrids that had extremely thin leaves. Plant traits in cannabis are very plastic and shape and size are easily manipulated through selective breeding. This also speaks to how closely related all the types of cannabis are, we can talk about 'two different types' but the differences are not huge.

 

[therevverend]

One other thing I should add here, don't underestimate how weird and funky European hemp is. Besides the moderately thin leaves it has nothing in common with tropical drug varieties. The cannabinoids and terpenes are backwards, the plants grow a stalk with almost no branching. Many strains are hermaphrodites. The plants autoflower or are extremely photo sensitive, maturing in August.

The British, Spanish, and Portuguese tried adapting them to tropical environments and failed miserably. I'd think they'd begin flowering almost after sprouting with the short tropical days. The only trait hemp has in common with drug cannabis is the narrow leaves and the leaves aren't all that narrow. Comparable to a lot of hybrids I've grown and nothing like the thin wispy leaves on African or Indian and other tropical strains.

 

[xxPeacePipexx]

I was recently asked about the Tuscarora and the names implications towards " people of the Hemp." Sadly Hightimes and some of the Tuscarora themselves pushed this as fact, even though highly debatable. Indian (N.American) Hemp is actually Dogbane cordage. Surely the people did weave such into garments and a lot more textiles than modern archeology may ever realize. But it leads to the question of Cannabis being in the Americas before the current historical time line indicates.

We know that Columbus was far from the first to sail here, just as we know that the Cowry shell (known as the Miigis among Algonquin speaking people who hold deep reverence for it,) and that it is actually a shell that's origin is said to be of African. This bringing forth a mystery and a suggestion that it is a very good possibility that the shells logically were displaced during a flood, or deluge. Then there's logic thought of the natural and human distribution of cannabis seed could have very well have grown isolated around the eastern coast and inland waterways.

Off subject, yet related to the question of Cannabis's orgin. There's a good amount of data in this thread and a lot of open minded people. Keep it up, it's great seeing this coming together with a good vibe and focal point of the unknown.

I was always under the impression that the plants truest of origin is the Himalayas. Then I began studying the unwritten his-story while growing plants from stock brought here from all over the world. And it has really helped me to remember what the old ones among the tribe always spoke of. And this is the simple fact of everything having a relationship. In the traditional view these are the Star plants and are universally one. It's said that skybeings came to even us bringing medicine to the people. Seems like every ancient culture has mythical beings that taught and brought humanity more than just knowledge. There's a plethora of ancient stories about the origins of the plant, but here we are nearing 2020 still speculating where on earth the plant hailed from....The Irony is priceless..

 

[MJPassion]

The more I read and study on this, and the more I think about it, the more annoying things occur to me.

I have Clarke’s book on cannabis botany, but is been a LONG time since I read it last. The entire argument for his alternate taxonomy is based on a story he’s working out...a story he presents as true, without any evidence I can see beyond the story. Unfamiliar with McPartland’s work, but what I’ve seen strikes me as highly speculative, and between him and Clarke, all probabilities are assessed from the assumption that the taxonomy is *wrong* and the Indica theory is *right*.

I distrust arguments based on a preconceived notion; it’s disruptive of fact to only value data that support our pet notions. If the scheme *clarified and corrected* the taxonomy, I’ll bet we could all see it, instead of things becoming murkier.

The only agenda I have with this is I want it to make more sense than what it wants to replace. I don’t even have preconceived ideas of what that would look like.

Thanks, revver, plenty of meat to chew on!

It is the definitions of the terms being used that matters.
Scientist incorrectly classify and then reclassify organisms all the time.


Look up what the definition of sativa is and you will, beyond any shadow of doubt, know what sativa really is.


It is not a cannabis specific term and is incorrectly used in all of R.C.C. and Sam Skunkmans writings as well as books & articles of others.


Indica names a place of discovery... that is all it does...
Same for any other Latin term that sounds like a country or region...



People want simple, I understand that, but simple people are sheep and follow the flock.

 

[Thule]

One other thing I should add here, don't underestimate how weird and funky European hemp is. Besides the moderately thin leaves it has nothing in common with tropical drug varieties. The cannabinoids and terpenes are backwards, the plants grow a stalk with almost no branching. Many strains are hermaphrodites. The plants autoflower or are extremely photo sensitive, maturing in August.

The British, Spanish, and Portuguese tried adapting them to tropical environments and failed miserably. I'd think they'd begin flowering almost after sprouting with the short tropical days. The only trait hemp has in common with drug cannabis is the narrow leaves and the leaves aren't all that narrow. Comparable to a lot of hybrids I've grown and nothing like the thin wispy leaves on African or Indian and other tropical strains.

Can be though This is Austrian ruderalis so basically feral hemp.



I do agree with pretty much everything you're saying but I'd like to emphasize the fact that both the NLD and WLD genepools are likely to contain hemp genes. Mexican and Jamaican probably more due to historical reasons, Afghani also due to geography. Central Asia is NLH territory. Where the two subspecies meet we tend to see massive diversity.