Between China and South Asia: A Middle Asian corridor of crop dispersal and agricultural innovation in the Bronze Age.

ABSTRACT: The period from the late third millennium BC to the start of the first millennium AD witnesses the first steps towards food globalization in which a significant number of important crops and animals, independently domesticated within China, India, Africa and West Asia, traversed Central Asia greatly increasing Eurasian agricultural diversity. This paper utilizes an archaeobotanical database (AsCAD), to explore evidence for these crop translocations along southern and northern routes of interaction between east and west. To begin, crop translocations from the Near East across India and Central Asia are examined for wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) from the eighth to the second millennia BC when they reach China. The case of pulses and flax (Linum usita

SUBMITTER: Stevens CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5125436 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature