Through the sequencing of Xinjiang wild apples, in 2017, Professor Chen Xuesen of Shandong Agricultural University proved that Xinjiang wild apples are the origin of cultivated apples in the world.
But for the question of "Apple originated in China", some netizens may still be confused. Some netizens questioned that there was no apple in ancient China, why did apple originate in China? Some netizens said that Apple originated in China, so did Adam and Eve Chinese?
For these discussions, in fact, everyone has a misunderstanding of "Apple".
"Apples originated in China" is more to say that the "old ancestors" of modern cultivated apples are in China. At present, the common apples are basically Western apples, which were first brought into Yantai, Shandong by American missionaries for cultivation, about 1871, but only 200 years ago.
Most of the apples we eat now are also Western apples. This apple is not native to our country. Apple strains such as Fuji apples, marshal apples, Guoguang apples, and Gala apples are not native to China. At present, everyone's general understanding of apples is that there were no apples in ancient China.
Of course, the apple here is the common definition of apple in everyone's daily life.
If it is more true, there are also "apples" in ancient China. However, that apple was not the type of apple today, but rather some apples. In ancient times, there were many apple fruit trees in China, and the more well-known ones were 柰, Lin Yu, Pin Po Guo, Wen Lin Guo, Lian Zhu Guo and so on. Collectively, we can call them "Chinese cotton apples", and most of their flesh is soft, not hard and crisp.
These types of "cotton apples" are all native to China. In ancient China, the word "apple" first appeared in the Yuan Dynasty, when it was written "apple fruit", and "apple" was the traditional character of apple. In the Ming Dynasty, "apple" was used to refer to almost most apple fruits. Later, after the introduction of Western apples to China, apples gradually became "Western apples".
In ancient China, there were "Chinese apples", but there were no Western apples that are commonly cultivated in modern times.
From a biological point of view, any creature has an ancestor. Taking humans as an example, the most primitive ancestor of human beings may be a fish in the sea; cats, tigers, lions, leopards and other cats also had the same ancestor called "first cat" more than 30 million years ago; apples also have ancestors.
Whether it is a Western apple or a "Chinese apple", the same ancestor is a "Xinjiang wild apple". That is to say, apples originated in China, referring to the ancestors of apples in China, but after millions of years of evolution and geographical isolation, apples grown in China are becoming more and more different from apples grown in the West, and gradually become 2 species.
At present, the apple you often eat is not native to our country, but its "old ancestor" is in our country. In addition to the old ancestors in China, Western apples also have a more well-known ancestor in Europe, that is, "forest apples". The forest apple is a highly acidic apple, but the pulp texture is harder.
The evolution of wild apples in Xinjiang originated from the primitive apples in China, and science speculates that many, many years ago, a wild species of apples was distributed in the central and western regions of China, and the seeds of this wild species were brought to the Tianshan Mountains by birds, and in the case of geographical isolation, a population of "Xinjiang wild apples" was formed.
Xinjiang wild apples were gradually domesticated into an ancient cultivar of cultivated apples, which later spread to Europe along the Silk Road.
The Wild Apple of Xinjiang in Europe has been genetically integrated with the local forest apple in Europe, and the flesh of the forest apple is relatively hard, and after the fusion of the two, the early "Western apple" was gradually born. Western apples have evolved into various varieties through grafting and breeding by ancient people, and have gradually spread to all parts of the world, becoming our more common apples.
China's cotton apple also originated from the wild apple in Xinjiang, but because it did not genetically fuse with the forest apple, but continuously integrated with some ancient apple plants in China, it did not form a hard flesh and relatively large size like the Western apple.
Most of the births of a species or variety are due to an accidental event.
#山东科研团队证实苹果起源于中国 #