the "real" landrace debate

[Thule]

I only care about the truth personally. I think if we keep on piling the evidence on the table the truth will come out eventually. I would never claim there was pre-colombian cannabis based on what we now know, I'm just keeping that option open.

For example 5 years ago there was pretty much a consensus in the scientific community that there was no interbreeding between modern humans and neandertals. The bones were there, the dna was there and the likelyhood was high considering our contemporary sexual behaviour, but no one had dug deep enough!

It was also not accepted as a fact that Polynesians
made it to the Americas and back until they sequenced the dna of Easter islanders, pre-colombian chicken and a coconut tree.. Yet it still happened. Lots, and I mean lots of American plant species have their origin in the old world and were present before Columbus. Even Banana, which originates in Papua New Guinea.

I know we can't assume cannabis was one of those plants, but until we have the research showing that there is no pre-colombian cannabis pollen in any of the lake sediments in America, no hemp fibers in the textiles or ropes, no thc in the mummies etc. etc. I'm holding on to the possibility that we just don't know it all yet.

It is safe to assume there was pre-colombian contact we don't yet know about, and we'll never know unless we keep on digging. It
may very well be that cannabis is a newcomer to the Americas, but we weren't there to know it for a fact. Until someone comes up with a looking glass I will be posting pictures of Elephants in Aztec ruins and pineapples in Roman frescos etc.

In the meantime we could start by trying to explain the presence of dwarf cannabis in Peru.

 

[Dkgrower]

its good to ask questions but if there is non physical evidence for your statment you need to do some pioneer work..

You should first go and see the many details studies off lake sediments taken from places where humans live and used to do

These studies use pollen to see what the pepol farmed near by and track 1000s off years off cultivation

Shooting Qs from the hip with out much back ground info is just to easy..

 

[Thule]

I was reading about lake sediments in late Titicaca just yesterday, no cannabis there.. but I am also growing strains from Peru and Oaxaca right now to compare them to each other, and later on to South East Asian strains like Philippinas I hope. This I find a lot more satisfying than lake sediments.

I'm not taking sides in this debate, and I'm not trying to prove anything, I just want to make sure we are looking at all the evidence objectively. And I do realize the evidence is lacking, but the point of digging for me is to find out when exactly did psychoactive cannabis arrive to the Americas and where from.

I want to see first hand if Latin American cannabis has a common root, and if they resemble anything across the Pacific.

 

[Thule]

There was traffic between Asia and America before Columbus, and it was more frequent than we might think. This is new evidence and might take some time to sink in.

Sweet potato DNA indicates early Polynesians traveled to South America

The history of sweet potato in the Pacific has long been an enigma. Archaeological, linguistic, and ethnobotanical data suggest that prehistoric human-mediated dispersal events contributed to the distribution in Oceania of this American domesticate. According to the "tripartite hypothesis," sweet potato was introduced into Oceania from South America in pre-Columbian times and was then later newly introduced, and diffused widely across the Pacific, by Europeans via two historically documented routes from Mexico and the Caribbean. Although sweet potato is the most convincing example of putative pre-Columbian connections between human occupants of Polynesia and South America, the search for genetic evidence of pre-Columbian dispersal of sweet potato into Oceania has been inconclusive. Our study attempts to fill this gap. Using complementary sets of markers (chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites) and both modern and herbarium samples, we test the tripartite hypothesis. Our results provide strong support for prehistoric transfer(s) of sweet potato from South America (Peru-Ecuador region) into Polynesia. Our results also document a temporal shift in the pattern of distribution of genetic variation in sweet potato in Oceania. Later reintroductions, accompanied by recombination between distinct sweet potato gene pools, have reshuffled the crop's initial genetic base, obscuring primary patterns of diffusion and, at the same time, giving rise to an impressive number of local variants. Moreover, our study shows that phenotypes, names, and neutral genes do not necessarily share completely parallel evolutionary histories. Multidisciplinary approaches, thus, appear necessary for accurate reconstruction of the intertwined histories of plants and humans.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-sweet-potato-dna-early-polynesians.html#jCp
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-sweet-potato-dna-early-polynesians.html

That map is pretty cool. It shows traffic of plants all the way to the Philippines, which is very close to Taiwan which has been a core area of cannabis cultivation for up to 8000 years. Apparently they were also growing corn in the Philippines in the 1400s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact

 

[rasputin]

Just a brief aside, to add to the growing information indicating that Polynesians and other cultures were doing things many might not expect, pre-first contact, including binary math some 200 years before Europeans were introduced to it.

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-polynesian-islanders-combined-binary-decimal.html

There is much we do not know about earlier, even ancient, civilizations, primarily those pre-contact with Europeans. Far too many people subscribe to the Hobbsian view of life before the State came and saved us all. I think that view is bullshit on the whole and we're learning more each day that challenges that.

 

[Commonwealth]

There is no scientific, anthropological, or archaeological evidence to suggest pre-Colombian cannabis in the new world. Indian Narrow Leaf Drug varieties brought by coolies in the 19th c and became bted with Narrow Leaf Hemp varieties brought by Europeans to create the hybrids that became Central and South American varieties.

 

[Commonwealth]

I love how this could be clarified with reading scientific papers on cannabis, but instead you have people wanting to speculate for years on personal conjecture so they have something to post about.

 

[rasputin]

That is a rather unscientific position, Commonwealth. Science doesn't stop because there is a published paper on one topic or another. That's not how it works and thankfully, many do not share your view of throwing in the towel on things we think have long since been settled.

None of this is to say cannabis was or wasn't in the Americas. I have no dog in this fight. I just find it funny how quick people are to assume that just because we have yet to discover something that it never happened and we shouldn't bother to try because we have all the information we need.

Hell, it was just recently discovered that human beings evolution began much earlier than expected and civilizations have been unearthed that completely up-end much of the accepted history of human migration and settlement, causing dates to be pushed back as far as 195,000 years in some instances like that of the dating of tools in the Ethiopian Rift Valley that occured in 2008.

It doesn't hurt to keep an open mind, or to bullshit about interesting topics on the internet. Isn't that what it's for?

 

[Commonwealth]

I understand where you're coming from but I feel you're enabling those who do no research. The same argument could be made that just because we haven't found Noah's Ark doesn't mean it isn't real - the weight of scientific evidence does count for something against "but you can't prove a negative".

 

[Thule]

I love how this could be clarified with reading scientific papers on cannabis, but instead you have people wanting to speculate for years on personal conjecture so they have something to post about.

Well this is a discussion board, I fail to see anything wrong with that as long as people are enjoying themselves. What keeps me coming back to this debate is not because I believe cannabis was in America before Columbus, but the attitude of people posting in this thread. "The scientist haven't found any proof. End of discussion." If everyone shared that attitude we wouldn't even have found the damn continent!

You are free to post any paper you feel would clarify this matter. I will say this again, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There are no prehistoric cannabis finds from India or Egypt, are we supposed to interpret that as evidence that it arrived only within the last 4000 years? I wouldn't have such blind faith in archeology. Without written records we wouldn't know anything about cannabis is India.

The point is, we don't know anything for a fact. Personally I don't BELIEVE cannabis came before Columbus, but I sure don't KNOW that. There are big gaps in our knowledge of prehistory and the archeological record. Just because they haven't yet stumbled upon Viracochas bud stash doesn't mean it can't still be hidden underneath some Incan temple.

Seriously though, if there was cannabis present, lake sediments are a good place to look for pollen and there are old clothes and ropes they could test, but such research is and has been marginal in developing countries. They should systematically be looking for it, and it's never going to happen in an atmosphere where history is taken for granted and nothing is questioned.

There's still that nicotine in Egyptian mummies, and thc in Peruvian mummies to be explained, so while you start by debunking that I'll continue gazing beyond the horizon.

 

[rasputin]

You give me too much credit, Commonwealth. I'm not enabling anyone nor could I if I tried. People are going to believe whatever they want, I don't think I have much influence on it either way. This thread has been running long before I decided to post in here.

I fully understand your point and largely agree. Proving a negative is easy and has already been done in this thread by others. That some still insist otherwise is their choice. It's not hurting anyone, really though some posters have used some fairly definitive language about something that is anything but so I can see why you think this is creating a pseudo-scientific debate and giving credence to what some might consider to be bullshit. Fortunately, I think their sphere of influence is very limited so they aren't going to be changing many minds any time soon.

My hypocrisy knows no bounds, though so on the one hand I can and do think Noah's Ark, the Shroud of Turin, et al; are bogus - or at the least irrelevant to me personally - I also think there remains possibility and potential for new discoveries that challenge our existing ideas and beliefs.

I am a cynically optimistic skeptic at heart, though.

 

[Commonwealth]

I'm not arguing the case is shut at all. I'm arguing that too many stoners behave as if their personal speculations(read: an opinion not based on the science and evidence available) carry as much weight as well-documented data. Speculation is fine for exploring but there's a lot of speculation here based upon other speculation. By all means speculate, but do it based on the evidence available - instead of using the argument that you can't prove a negative to inflate empty conjecture.

 

[Commonwealth]

Word, Rasp. One Love.

 

[rasputin]

The point is, we don't know anything for a fact.

This is where you lose me. Commonwealth's point about proving a negative is very much valid.

There are facts. Put your hand on a hot iron. It will burn. This is absolute fact. Nothing relative about it. Don't believe me? Give it a try. Let us know how things go.

 

[Thule]

This is where you lose me. Commonwealth's point about proving a negative is very much valid.

There are facts. Put your hand on a hot iron. It will burn. This is absolute fact. Nothing relative about it. Don't believe me? Give it a try. Let us know how things go.

Only referring to this particular case here.

 

[LLCoolJ]

I personally believe that Cannabis and all other living beings were already there when the continents were still one huge super continent called Pangaea.

 

[Ganja baba]

cannabis hemp rope was used on Easter island to pull the big stone heads around the island .

also birds eat seeds we know this so come on it is entirely possible some populations of cannabis could have existed in the Americas at some point , this does not mean it was cultivated and indeed if cannabis was introduced to the Americas as a drug or fibre plant it for sure would have been the plant of choice and all land race none cultivated plants would have just got washed into the mix along the way , the fact no one publicised the use of cannabis doesn't mean it was not growing or used by individual populations of people at different time spans .

i would agree though after going to India and seeing for my self how prolific cannabis is in the wild it would be impossible to eradicate, its so at home there, its like nettles here in the uk you could never get rid of them as the uk weather is perfect . same with cannabis if the conditions are right it cant be stopped , the highest natural populations are i believe in India and Asia in general this would lead me to assume Asia is the birthplace of cannabis ,
and before continental drift if there are fossil records of cannabis at that time i have no problem assuming cannabis could have also stayed in the what we now call Americas it makes perfect sense to me but then again i am so stoned lol

 

[Storm Shadow]

http://www.medicinalgenomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Cannabis_Haplotypes1.pdf

Organelle DNA haplotypes reflect crop-use characteristics and​

geographic origins of Cannabis sativa

[FONT=AdvPS_TTB][FONT=AdvPS_TTB] http://letfreedomgrow.org/cmu/Russo2007.pdf

History of Cannabis and Its Preparations in Saga, Science, and Sobriquet

http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop.../_Afghanistan_Cannabis_Survey_Report_2012.pdf

​

Afghanistan Survey of Commercial Cannabis Cultivation and Production 2012

http://www.madchat.fr/esprit/textur...uana_Chemistry-Michael_Starks_2nd_edition.pdf

Marijuana Chemistry
Genetics, Processing, and Potency


Just for the record... I have genetics from the Old World and I'm finding flavors and smells that other breeders claimed they created just pop all over the place...



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[med-man]

hey storm shadow

you are one of those "breeders" in question? well how would anyone know if no one else had tried "your" stuff?

nevermind

thanks for the links

med-man

 

[resin_lung]

Kinda sounds like we're all on the same page regarding what the books say vs what they'll say when there's sufficient evidence to rewrite them. I love discussing both subjects, but I do very much see them as two distinct subjects.

Thule, that pic cracked me up!!! That guy is totally working the Einstein angle with his hair! It gets wilder and wilder each time. I'd like to know more about those dwarfs in Peru? Do you have a link or know the issue of high times? I can't seem to find it.