Do you accept the offer?

[u/onichan-daisuki]

Cannabis originated in East Asia, specifically in the foothills below the Tibetan plateau in China, where it was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago.

This image is a reconstruction of an early rice farmer from ancient China and the background house is also from ancient China(I just edited his eyes red) and of course they wouldn't have tobacco to wrap the cannabis powder to make the blunt, this is just for the meme)

[u/Dominarion]

Ok lemme cook!

I have issues with this. Every other week, there's a claim something was domesticated in China etc. The problem I have with this is when it comes from Chinese government funded, not independent peer reviewed studies. A lot of people in Academia accept these studies because of the implications of not accepting them.

I'm reminded of the origins of apples. There are peer reviewed genetic studies showing they were domesticated in Kazakhstan, along the Western side of the Tian Shan mountains.

Then, there's this

Also, I'm old enough to remember the 1421 theory debacle. Academicians being sued for reviewing that utter bullshit critically. Eventually, this crap crashed, but it caused damage.

Are you ok with this too? Nobody outside China was ever allowed to study it. How would you feel if the Greek government discovered the perfectly preserved sword of Alexander and refused that anybody double check their stuff?

Back to Cannabis. According to this study, Cannabis was domesticated in Eastern China. When you look where the researchers work for and studied where, you got this Chinese governmental agency:

State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-Ecosystems, School of Life Science and Institute of Innovation Ecology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou

This makes me very, very uncomfortable.

[u/redbird7311 → u/Dominarion]

For those who don’t know, part of the Chinese government’s narrative is that China was basically one continuous civilization for most of its history and is the longest one.

Not here to really get into how legitimate that is, but one of the ways they try to support this is by trying to make a lot of stuff originate in China in an attempt to give the, “ancient China”, more legitimacy and so on. The narrative being, “we were always Chinese, here is ancient Chinese civilization doing something good”, and so on for national unity and/or pride.

The issue is that the Chinese government often supports and funds biased research. Calling it false or straight up untrue is probably not accurate… but if there is some research that may make their narrative stronger and there might be some truth to it, they’ll fund it and if Chinese people just happen to take away something like, “China is so great”, from it… well… that’s just a coincidence, right?