Abstract
Horsegram has been an important crop since the beginning of agriculture in many parts of South Asia. Despite horsegram’s beneficial properties as a hardy, multi-functional crop, it is still regarded as a food of the poor, particularly in southern India. Mistakenly regarded as a minor crop, largely due to entrenched biases against this under-utilised crop, horsegram has received far less research than other pulses of higher status. The present study provides an updated analysis of evidence for horsegram’s origins, based on archaeological evidence, historical linguistics, and herbarium collections of probable wild populations. Our survey of herbarium specimens provides an updated map of the probable range of the wild progenitor. A large database of modern reference material provides an updated baseline for distinguishing wild and domesticated seeds, while an extensive dataset of archaeological seed measurements provides evidence for regional trends towards larger seed size, indicating domestication. Separate trends towards domestication are identified for north-western India around 4000 BP, and for the Indian Peninsula around 3500 BP, suggesting at least two separate domestications. This synthesis provides a new baseline for further germplasm sampling, especially of wild populations, and further archaeobotanical data collection.
Highlights
Horsegram (Macrotyloma uniflorum (Lam.) Verdc. is a hardy pulse crop of semi-arid tropics that has been poorly studied
In India, except in the high Himalayas, there are three main language families (Indo-European, Austroasiatic [Munda], and Dravidian), and most common names across all of these families suggest a shared ancient name for horsegram, indicating deep cultural roots and ancient cultural knowledge of this crop that was transferred across languages (Fuller 2003, 2007a; Southworth 2005). We briefly summarize these data here, as they suggest an origin of this crop somewhere in the peninsular Indian region, and it can be suggested that knowledge of this crop, or at least its name, was transmitted from the early Dravidian speakers of peninsular India to early Indic languages and Austroasiatic
The evidence of remnant wild populations today suggest that the wild progenitors were distributed in the semi-arid savannah or scrub woodland zones, including margins of tropical dry deciduous woodlands, of western and peninsular India, and through parts of the lower slopes of the western Himalayas
Summary
Horsegram (Macrotyloma uniflorum (Lam.) Verdc. is a hardy pulse crop of semi-arid tropics that has been poorly studied. Is a hardy pulse crop of semi-arid tropics that has been poorly studied. Despite its current and historical importance to the diet of a large part of the population in India, there are entrenched biases against horsegram, as it is considered a low status food of the poor, in southern India (Kadam et al 1985; Ambasta 1986, 181). Smartt (1985, 299) remarked that “[t]here has been remarkably little incentive to study domestication and evolution of horse gram”. Very little agronomic research has been done on this crop (Yadav 1992). The limited scientific knowledge of this crop is reflected in its status in textbooks, even those produced in India, its main country of production (Fig. 1). Horsegram has received far less research than pulses of higher status, such as Indian Vigna (V. radiata (L.) Wilczek, V. mungo (L.) Hepper) or pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan (L.)
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