Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.), one of the first domesticated crops, has been grown in Northern China for at least 10,000 years. The species is presently a minor crop, and evaluation of its genetic diversity has been very limited. In this study, we analyzed the genetic diversity of 88 accessions of broomcorn millet collected from various provinces of China. Amplification with 67 simple...

The Peiligang Culture (9000-7000 cal. yr BP) in the Middle Yellow River region, North China, has long been considered representative of millet farming. It is still unclear, however, if broomcorn millet or foxtail millet was the first species domesticated during the Peiligang Culture. Furthermore, it is also unknown whether millet was cultivated singly or together with rice at the same period. I...

Waxy mutants, in which endosperm starch contains ~100% amylopectin rather than the wild-type composition of ~70% amylopectin and ~30% amylose, occur in many domesticated cereals. The cultivation of waxy varieties is concentrated in east Asia, where there is a culinary preference for glutinous-textured foods that may have developed from ancient food processing traditions. The waxy phenotype resu...

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is one of the world's oldest cultivated cereals, which is well-adapted to extreme environments such as drought, heat, and salinity with an efficient C4 carbon fixation. Discovery and identification of genes involved in these processes will provide valuable information to improve the crop for meeting the challenge of global climate change. However, the lac...

We have collated and reviewed published records of the genera Panicum and Setaria (Poaceae), including the domesticated millets Panicum miliaceum L. (broomcorn millet) and Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv. (foxtail millet) in pre-5000 cal b.c. sites across the Old World. Details of these sites, which span China, central-eastern Europe including the Caucasus, Iran, Syria and Egypt, are presented wi...

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) is one of the world's oldest cultivated cereals, with several lines of recent evidence indicating that it was grown in northern China from at least 10,000 cal bp. Additionally, a cluster of archaeobotanical records of P. miliaceum dated to at least 7000 cal bp exists in eastern Europe. These two centres of early records could either represent independent ...

By roughly 8,000 calendar years before the present (calBP), hunter-gatherers across a broad swath of north China had begun small-scale farming of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) and foxtail millet (Setaria italica). According to traditional wisdom, this early millet farming evolved from the intensive hunter-gatherer adaptation represented by the late Pleistocene microblade tradition of nor...

Following their early domestication, broomcorn millet and rice (in East Asia) wheat barley South-west were subsequently adopted across Eurasia during the Bronze Age/early historic period. The precise timing dispersal routes for this trans-Eurasian exchange, however, remain unclear. Here, authors present archaeobotanical evidence from sites on Caspian Sea's southern coast, demonstrating that rea...

Broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum) was known throughout Eurasia in the second millennium BC in regions with warm, moist summers, where its cultivation reduced agricultural risk. Its cultivation during the warm, but dry months at Kyzyltepa and other Iron Age sites in western Central Asia was probably made possible through irrigation practices that were long known and originally developed in th...

Potato has become one of the primary cash crops in the arid region of the Loess Plateau. However, what and how cereal crops to rotate with potato is better for the farmer’s income and environment is unclear now. 11 potato based rotation systems were simulated in Yulin, using EPIC model based on local information. Results showed 1) Though mean potato yield decreased from 6.84 to 5.38 t/hm, the m...