Office of Medical Communications

John McPartland, D.O., M.S., clinical assistant professor of family medicine

(NOVEMBER 9, 2019) A study led by John McPartland, D.O., M.S., clinical assistant professor of family medicine, suggests that while cannabis is generally believed to have evolved in Asia and later dispersed to Europe by people, the plant was most likely indigenous to Europe long before humans were present.

“Not during the Neolithic Age, when Europe’s first farmers began cultivating other plants,” McPartland said. “Europe’s first farmers came from the Fertile Crescent, and they grew plants from the Fertile Crescent. This Fertile Crescent ‘crop package’—wheat, barley, oats, etc.—included flax, Linum usitatissimum, a plant they grew for fiber [linen] and for seed oil.”

McPartland said the results of the study are significant for modern-day ideas of cannabis because they challenge common belief that the differences between the high-CBD European cannabis and high-THC Asian cannabis are due to human selection. “The differences between European and Asian cannabis likely began with a million years of genetic drift,” he said.

McPartland and his researching partners are already working on another study. “We’ve expanded our fossil pollen study to Asia, and the oldest cannabis pollen we’ve found there dates back 19.7 million years ago, in the northeastern Tibetan plateau,” he said. "So it looks like cannabis did originate in Central Asia. That’s our next paper.”