Mungbean in Central Asia: It went there from East Asia, not South Asia.

Abstract

The migration and dispersal of organisms is fascinating from many perspectives and, in the case of crop plants, intersects with the movement of human beings. As they explore new areas, agricultural peoples carry seeds of crops, which move and may establish ('diffuse') where they go. In order to understand the movement of the crop across regions, we need to understand the pattern and rate of diffusion of the crop, as well as that of the people involved, both those who carried it and those who adopted it. What determines whether a particular crop will establish in a new region with a different climate and other environmental factors (e.g., precipitation), likely necessitating genetic change through natural or artificial selection (e.g., Rendo´n-Anaya et al. 2017)? The extent to which the rate of diffusion is determined by evolutionary and environmental processes, on the one hand, and human migratory processes, on the other, is a complex question that has not been resolved even for as intensively studied a crop as maize (Stoneking et al. 2023).