Thursday, May 20, 2021

The Domestication Of The Opium Poppy

The opium poppy was not part of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic package of domesticated crops, but was added soon afterwards. 

[T]he opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) was domesticated in the western Mediterranean, where its presumed progenitor Papaver somniferum subsp. setigerum (DC.) Arcang is native and still grows wild today.

Using a new method of analysis, researchers from the universities of Basel and Montpellier have now been able to strengthen the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers living in pile dwellings around the Alps began to cultivate and use the opium poppy on a large scale from about 5500 BCE. By doing so, they contributed to its domestication, as the team reports in the journal Scientific Reports.

From this press release about  Ana Jesus, et al., "A morphometric approach to track opium poppy domestication." 11(1) Scientific Reports (2021) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-88964-4.

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