The fascinating evolution of the original land race cannabis plant. 

The cannabis market has exploded, and as growers learn more about using genetics to their advantage, a wide variety of strains have emerged. With just a quick look online or at your local dispensary, you’ll find hundreds of modified breeds for every possible occasion.

But all this variety has its origins somewhere. Actually, we can trace all cannabis strains to a small number of original cannabis plants known as landrace strains.

What Exactly is a Landrace Strain?

A landrace is essentially an isolated plant that has not been crossbred with other cannabis varieties. They tend to be indigenous to specific regions, and developed their particular qualities as the strain adapted to their unique environment.

As such, landrace strains are often named in accordance with their region: Pure Afghan, Durban Poison, Panama Red, and so on.

Cannabis historians believed landrace strains originated in Asia.

Landrace really only refers to the genetic purity of a cannabis strain. Landrace strains won’t necessarily produce a better product. In fact, the reason there are so many crossbred strains on the market is that breeding a plant for a specific trait ensures a specific, quality finished product.

Being genetically closer to the original wild cannabis species is really the main drawcard for landrace strains. They hold particular intrigue for historians, scientists, and purists.

“Clocking” the Age of Cannabis

Scientists have long searched for cannabis’s origin. Or, at the very least, for the original wild landrace strain of this infamous medicinal plant. Common thought placed the original plant in locations across Asia. However, scientists weren’t so sure of the precise original location.

That was until recently when a study of fossilized pollen found the location of the first cannabis species.

Accurately determining when and where cannabis evolved was extremely difficult due to the lack of a strong print fossil record – impression of leaves or fruits in rocks. For a plant, like cannabis, that lacks a good fossil record, paleobotanists can use a “molecular clock”. This allows them to estimate when cannabis and its sister species Humulus (hops) diverged from a common ancestor. The molecular clock uses DNA to measure time, and calibrates the clock with fossil dates of related plants.

Using this method, they estimated that cannabis first diverged from a common ancestor 27.8 million years ago.

Hops and cannabis derive from the same common ancestor.

Once researchers had figured out when cannabis first diverged from a common ancestor, the question of where still remained. Paleobotanists then turned to microfossils, such as fossilized pollen, to fill in the records. They found that pollen from the closely related cannabis and hop plants are almost indistinguishable.

To overcome this problem, scientists realized that because cannabis typically grows in open grasslands, and hops grow in forests, the pollen could be classified by identifying other plants that commonly occur alongside it. Researchers used plants that are typically seen in open grasslands to identify the fossilized pollen as cannabis.

How Scientists Dated and Located Fossilized Cannabis Pollen

Fossilized pollen is usually used to date the layer in which it is found, which tells a lot about the environment at the time. However, in this case, the pollen was the unknown. Researchers aged it with radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating measures the amount of radiocarbon (C14) left in a fossilized animal or plant. C14 degrades at a known rate, and so by testing the amount of C14 left in a fossil, its age can be accurately calculated.

By using this analysis, the oldest fossilized cannabis pollen was located in the Ningxia Province, China. Researchers dated the pollen at 19.6 million years old. But with cannabis diverging 27.8 million years ago, this date wasn’t close enough.

Further research of the region and tracking of a plant called Artemisia, which has a close alliance and parallel evolutionary pattern to cannabis, pinpointed the northeastern Tibetan Plateau as the cannabis center of origin. At the time, the Tibetan Plateau created an environment that supports the theory that cannabinoids developed to protect the plant from UV rays and herbivores. These are both issues in the high altitude, open grassland Tibetan Plateau.

Cannabis stems from a single location on the Tibetan Plateau.

Further Landrace Strains

Fossil pollen records tell us that cannabis dispersed into Europe 6 million years ago. Then later East into China 1.2 million years ago. By mapping the distribution of pollen over time, scientists were able to see that European cannabis went through repeated genetic bottlenecks.

Following the warm and wet Holocene period, forests replaced open grasslands. Cannabis retreated to the small pockets of open space that it could inhabit. In these small and isolated areas, the population of cannabis shrank. These separated cannabis populations then evolved differently, eventually creating the separate and distinct landrace strains of the European-evolved sativa and the Asian-evolved indica.

By tracing cannabis evolution back to a single location on the Tibetan Plateau millions of years ago, we have uncovered the site of the original cannabis landrace strain. Over thousands of years, the original cannabis strain moved across continents, becoming isolated in certain areas.

The original landrace strain had to then develop to new conditions, eventually leading to a variety of landrace strains. Each developed unique geno-phenotypical characteristics reflective of adaptations provoked by their local environment. And these ancient strains have become the mythologized landrace strains that we idolize today.

The post Fossilized Cannabis Reveals The Plant is 27.8 Million Years Old appeared first on RxLeaf.

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Over the next several weeks, our planet will have a close encounter with the Taurid meteor swarm.  It will be the closest that we have been to the center of the meteor swarm since 1975, and we won’t have an encounter this close again until 2032.  So for astronomers, this is a really big deal.  And hopefully there will be no danger to Earth during this pass, but some scientists are absolutely convinced that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 which flattened 80 million trees in Russia was caused by an object from the Taurid meteor swarm.  As you will see below, the last week of June will mark the point when we are the closest to the center of the meteor swarm, and so that will be when the risk is the greatest.  According to CBS News, our planet “will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm” by the end of this month…

This summer, Earth will approach within 30,000,000 km of the center of the Taurid swarm, the study says. That would be Earth’s closest encounter with the swarm since 1975 and the best viewing opportunity we’ll have until the early 2030s.

30 million kilometers may sound like a great distance, but in astronomical terms that is not very far at all, and it is important to remember that distance is measured from the exact center of the meteor swarm.

And there are some scientists that are convinced that giant rocks from this meteor swarm have been responsible for multiple “once-per-1,000-years catastrophic events on Earth” in the past.  The following comes from Forbes…

The remnants of a comet. As Earth orbits the Sun, its orbital path often goes through dust and debris left by comets, with matter no bigger than a grain of sand busting into Earth’s atmosphere and burning up as “shooting stars”. Mostly, they’re harmless, but the Taurid swam is an exceptionally large cloud of debris, probably from Comet 2P/Encke, that scientists think may be responsible for some once-per-1,000-years catastrophic events on Earth. The Taurid complex-giant comet hypothesis proposes that a giant comet fragmented in the inner solar system, producing dust and small Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), including 2P/Encke and other asteroids, still present today. Among the observational evidence is increased “fireball” shooting star activity when Earth gets close to the “Taurid Swarm”, and increased impacts on the Moon.

In particular, it is now widely believed that the enormous object that exploded over Russia on June 30th, 1908 was from the Taurid meteor swarm.

If you are not familiar with the Tunguska event, here is some excellent information about it from Wikipedia…

Early estimates of the energy of the air burst range from 10–15 megatons of TNT (42–63 petajoules) to 30 megatons of TNT (130 PJ),^[7] depending on the exact height of burst estimated when the scaling-laws from the effects of nuclear weapons are employed.^[7][8] However, modern supercomputer calculations that include the effect of the object’s momentum find that more of the energy was focused downward than would be the case from a nuclear explosion and estimate that the airburst had an energy range from 3 to 5 megatons of TNT (13 to 21 PJ).^[8]

The 15-megaton (Mt) estimate represents an energy about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan—roughly equal to that of the United States’ Castle Bravo (15.2 Mt) ground-based thermonuclear detonation on 1 March 1954, and about one-third that of the Soviet Union‘s Tsar Bomba explosion on 30 October 1961 (which, at 50 Mt, is the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated).^[9]

It is estimated that the Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi), and that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.

It is interesting to note that the Tunguska event happened during the last week of June in 1908, and right now researchers are telling us that the last week of June this year “will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near-misses”…

Researchers from the Universities of New Mexico and Western Ontario warn we could be in for a similarly catastrophic event.

“If the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream, then the last week in June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near-misses,” the researchers wrote in a recent paper.

Of course nobody is saying that something will happen during that time.

It is simply a time when there is a heightened risk, and we should all be hoping that absolutely nothing happens.

However, we should not completely dismiss this threat either.  A couple of years ago, scientists discovered a “new branch” of the meteor swarm that contains “asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide”…

Scientists have discovered a new branch of the Taurids meteor stream that could pose a major risk to Earth, with asteroids up to 1,000 feet wide flying past us every few years.

If a 1,000 foot asteroid hit our planet tomorrow, we would be talking about the sort of civilization-changing event that I have been warning about for a very long time.

But once again, it is probably not likely that something will happen over the next few weeks.

In fact, scientists tell us that it is far more likely that there will be some sort of impact in 2032…

In November 2032, Earth will pass through the Taurid Swarm, a cloud of debris from Comet 2P/Encke that makes brilliant fireballs when its gravelly particles occasionally hit Earth’s atmosphere. Previous encounters with the Swarm in 2005 and 2015 produced showers of bright meteors observed around the world; in 1975 the Swarm contacted the Moon, making Apollo seismic sensors ring with evidence of objects hitting the lunar surface. If forecasters are correct, we’re in for similar activity 13 years from now.

In the end, we simply do not know when the next catastrophic meteor impact will happen, but scientists assure us that they will keep on happening.

Giant rocks go whizzing by our planet on a continual basis, and much of the time we do not even see them until they have already passed us.

So we may get some advance warning before a civilization-killing rock hits us someday, but then again, we might not.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

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