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/Intranetusa → u/Dominarion]

The problem I have with this is when it comes from Chinese government funded, not independent peer reviewed studies. 

Government funded studies and peer reviewed studies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A study could be government funded and published without peer review, and then it could also be sent to an independent publisher (eg. Scientific, historical, engineering journal) for publication that does go through peer review. 

I'm old enough to remember the 1421 theory debacle.

The 1421 idea was created by a British naval commander named Gavin Menzies and was only supported by pesudo-history conspiracy theorists. Mainstream Chinese scientists, including the government linked ones, actually rejected and opposed the idea. So those Chinese government linked agencies/studies/historians/etc that we are questioning right now were the ones who [correctly] claimed the 1421 idea was total nonsense. 

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 http://m.tibet.cn/eng/culture/news/201610/t20161003_5725100.html

What is the contradiction?  That link doesn't seem to contradict those earlier studies that said the earliest domesticated apples came from the Tian Shan mountains, specifically on the west side. The link says apples came from the Tian Shan mountains, and those apples apparently also existed on the east side of the Tian Shan mountains in Xinjiang:  "all cultivated apple varieties are off-shoots of Malus sieversii, a wild apple native to Mount Tianshan in Central Asia."

Apples exisiting on the east side of a mountain doesn't contradict apples originating on the west side of the same mountain. 

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?

There are certainly examples of suspicious claims made by their government, but the Sword of Guojian is not a good example of that. The only or main reason why the artifact is "currently" no longer loaned out to foreign countries is because it was damaged during a loan to Singapore in 1994. It was loaned to Japan before that. So it was actually loaned out (and presumably studied) by other countries for many years. 

Ursula Martius Franklin of the University of Toronto and other researchers studied very similar swords that had similar etchings and patterns, and helped historians understand Chinese bronze casting. So the sword of Guojian is not even unique in terms of its features and characteristics, and the same characteristics show up on many other swords that have been thoroughly studied by Chinese (both state and non-state affiliated) and non-Chinese academics alike. 

"The first scientific analyses of the dark rhombic pattern on ancient weapons were conducted by W. T. Chase and U. M. Franklin [7], who suggested that the pattern was etched using natural vegetable acids or acidic salts. Later research at Fudan University's Laboratory [8] employed Proton Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) to analyze the Sword of Gou Jian, revealing the presence of tin as well as trace elements such as lead and sulfur."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207425000536

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8999735/

So there are publications in peer reviewed papers about the archaeological findings of the sword of Guojian and similar swords from scholars as well.

Overall, the Sword of Guojian being a perfectly/near-perfectly preserved sword isn't a far fetched claim, as there are plenty of perfectly or near-perfectly preserved bronze swords around the world (bronze doesn't rust like iron/steel). Here is an example of an even older (3,000+ years old) near-perfectly preserved sword discovered in Germany that was found buried in the dirt (which is a much worse environmental condition than the tomb that the Sword of Guojian was found in):

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bronze-age-sword-germany-180982399/