Press Releases & News Media
IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
The Past, Present, and Future of the Human Niche // November 3, 2023
Prof Greger Larson and Dr Robert Spengler converse about domestication
Rob and Greger discuss domestication and the archaeological trail of evidence for how it came about.
Science // September 15, 2021
Milk fueled Bronze Age expansion of ‘eastern cowboys’ into Europe
“To see what might have fueled the Yamnaya’s success, researchers from the United States, Europe, and Russia looked for milk proteins trapped and preserved in the dental calculus of people living on the steppes of modern-day Russia between 4600 and 1700 B.C.E. They examined 56 skeletons from more than two dozen sites north of the Caspian Sea.”
Voices on Central Asia // August 18, 2021
“Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat”. An Interview with Robert Spengler
“Dr. Spengler is interested in the vast area between China and Europe, which was long thought to be a space for passing through rather than a source of anything significant, and his interest is physical and archeobotanical. His book confirms that this diverse land—arid in some areas and extremely fertile in others—is home to a vast range of crops, from almonds and apples to tea and rice.”
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World // 2020
“Despite the many difficulties posed by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Uzbek-American Expedition to Bukhara, co-directed by Sören Stark and Jamal K. Mirzaakhmedov managed to carry out a highly successful season of fieldwork.”
The Global Lives of Indian Cotton // 2020
“By 1000 CE, cotton seeds appear in archaeological sites across the Persian Gulf region to the central Asian highlands. While the spread of cotton through this region pre-dated Islamic expansion in areas like northwestern Uzbekistan, the expansion of trade networks across the Silk Road helped cotton spread to Beijing, Tehran, and Venice. This trade concentrated wealth through networks of exchange across Eurasia and Africa.”
Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology // December 1, 2020
Agropastoralists in Central Tibet Chose a Barley-Based Farming System by 3,000 Years Ago
“Crop transitions are usually tied to complex sets of factors,” says Dr. Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute. “We speculate that a combination of factors drove this specific crop transition, including cold tolerance, low irrigation requirements, fuel-saving qualities, and benefit for a mobile pastoralism lifestyle.”
Sapiens // October 16, 2020
“In 2019, archaeologists working in western China announced another major discovery: the oldest known evidence of cannabis smoking by humans. They uncovered 2,500-year-old braziers, vessels designed to create large quantities of smoke, that contained residues of a highly potent form of cannabis—suggesting that the plant was burned and inhaled.”
The New York Times // May 11, 2020
Eating in Xi’an, Where Wheat and Lamb Speak to China’s Varied Palate
“It thrives on dry summers and winter rain, the opposite of the climate in northern China, and its migration here in the third millennium B.C. from the Fertile Crescent, a sweep of land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, was an early example of ingredients crossing borders, as the archaeobotanist Robert N. Spengler III notes in ‘Fruit From the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat’ (2019).”
How Millets Sustained Mongolia’s Empires // March 2020
5200-Year-Old Cereal Grains From the Eastern Altai Mountains // February 2020
Rethinking the Origins of Plant Domestication // February 2020
ThoughtCo. // November 19, 2019
"Broomcorn millet seeds were recently found at the central Eurasian site of Begash, Kazakhstan, and Spengler et al. (2014) argue that this represents evidence for the transmission of broomcorn outside of China and into the broader world."
Futurity // July 2019
Thank Bison and Their Dung for Domesticated Quinoa
Natalie Mueller and Robert Spengler “have been interested in plant domestication since they were graduate students together at Washington University, under Gayle Fritz, one of the first scholars to recognize the importance of the American Midwest as a center of crop domestication."
The Origins of Cannabis Smoking // June 2019
Exploring the Origins of the Apple // May 2019
ThoughtCo. // March 31, 2019
The Ancient Societies of the Central Asian Steppe: Bronze Age Mobile Pastoralists of Central Asia
"Spengler and colleagues argue that these nomadic herders were one of the ways in which these crops moved outside of their domestications: broomcorn from the east; and wheat and barley from the west."
Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology // January 1, 2019
FEDD: Fruits of Eurasia Domestication and Dispersal
“Robert Spengler’s project, Fruits of Eurasia: Domestication and Dispersal, will allow him to step beyond the heavy focus on cereal crops in domestication studies, to look more closely at long-generation perennials, notably fruit and nut trees.”
Science News // December 13, 2018
Corn Domestication Took Some Unexpected Twists and Turns
“The new study highlights a growing realization that pathways toward domestication differed for various plants and animals, says paleoethnobotanist Robert Spengler of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.”
Origins and Spread of Eurasian Fruits on the Ancient Silk Road // August 2018
Botany One // June 12, 2018
The Increasingly Fluid Silk Road
“This work adds to that of Robert Spengler III et al., that underlines the importance of agriculture and exchange to social developments of the communities in Central Asia during the Iron Age, in the first millennium BC/BCE.”
The Diplomat // April 11, 2018
How Ancient Exchanges in Central Asia Shaped the Modern World
Spengler’s work has shown that for at least 4,000 years, the mountains of Central Asia (and the people who lived in them) helped to move domestic crops such as millet, wheat, barley, and rice into parts of the continent where they were previously unknown. “As early as the 3rd millennium BCE,” he says, “exchange in crop varieties across Central Asia shaped the economies of the ancient world.
Max Planck Research // August 23, 2017
Change That Came From the Plowed Field
"All over the globe, it was agriculture that set off wide-ranging social changes. The exception is the area that is today's Mongolia, Western China, and Eastern Russia: the textbook opinion since the 1930s. ... For around ten years now, this worldview has been showing cracks. The man stirring up trouble -- in a positive sense -- is Robert Spengler." (pages 26-33)
ScienceNews // November 15, 2017
How Asian Nomadic Herders Built New Bronze Age Cultures
"Herders moving through those valleys brought southwestern Asian crops into China and eastern Asian crops back the other way, says archaeologist Robert Spengler. While working their way across Asia through mountain valleys, pastoralists incorporated crops into their own way of life."
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog // September 29, 2015
Wheat that Goes Around, Comes Around
“There’s lots of fascinating material in Robert Spengler’s new review paper on agriculture in the Central Asian Bronze Age.”
Awkward Botany // November 2, 2014
“Concern about food and the environment has been on the rise for a while now. Interest in healthy food grown and produced in a responsible manner has prompted people to investigate where their food is coming from. Archaeologists studying plant domestication and the rise of agriculture are also concerned with where our food came from; however, their research efforts are more focused on prehistoric events rather than on what is being stocked on today’s grocery store shelves.”
Ancient Nomads Spread Earliest Domestic Grains Along Silk Road // April 2014