Abstract
Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. commonly known as pigeonpea, red gram or gungo pea is an important grain legume crop, particularly in rain-fed agricultural regions in the semi-arid tropics, including Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. This paper provides a baseline for the study of the domestication and early history of C. cajan, through reviewing its modern wild distribution, seed morphometrics of wild and domesticated populations, historical linguistics and the archaeological record. The distribution of wild populations, including published records and additional herbarium collections, suggest that the wild habitats of pigeonpea were at the interface of the forest-edge areas and more open savanna plains in eastern Peninsular India (e.g. Telangana, Chattisgarh, Odisha). Early archaeological finds presented here have been recovered from both the Southern peninsula and Odisha. Historical linguistic data suggests early differentiation into longer and shorter growing season varieties, namely arhar and tuar types, in prehistory. Pigeonpea had spread to Thailand more than 2000 years ago. Measurements of seeds from modern populations provide a baseline for studying domestication from archaeological seeds. Available measurements taken on archaeological Cajanus spp. suggest that all archaeological collections thus far fall into a domesticated Length:Width ratio, while they may also pick up the very end of the trend towards evolution of larger size (the end of the domestication episode) between 3700 and 3200 years BP. This suggests a trend over time indicating selection under domestication had begun before 3700 years ago and can be inferred to have started 5000–4500 years ago.
Highlights
Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. has, until fairly recently, received relatively little research attention despite its importance in India and other countries worldwide.Colloquially known as the ‘orphan crop’ or ‘poor people’s meat’ due to its high protein content, Cajanus cajan (L.) Millspaugh (Syn.: Cajanus indicus Spreng.; Cajanus flavus DC.; Cytisus cajan L.) from the family Fabaceae, is more commonly known as pigeonpea
Despite some claims for an African origin (Watt 1889; Purseglove 1976) it has been convincingly demonstrated that the likely wild progenitor was Cajanus cajanifolius found today in eastern India, including the modern state of Odisha and adjacent states, an origin earlier suggested by Haines (1921-1925)
Cajanus cajanifolius is clustered in eastern India in what is the modern state of Odisha
Summary
Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. has, until fairly recently, received relatively little research attention despite its importance in India and other countries worldwide. For short-cycle field crops there is a single widespread cognate set found in both the reconstructions of Early Dravidian (*tu-var-) and Old Indo-Aryan (*tubarı-) These shared terms suggest the evolution of short cycle varieties may have taken place near where these language families overlap geographically, namely around Odisha, Chattisgarh and/or northeast Andhra Pradesh, which is likely to be in or near zone for the domestication and early evolution of domesticated Cajanus cajan. We recorded measurements of archaeological pigeonpea, both of specimens in our collections and those in the published literature (Table 3) These provide a time series of seed size data for regional populations, especially for the Deccan and South India, which allows us to trace the evolution of seed size as one aspect of the domestication syndrome in this species.
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