Yeast Probably Originated in China | Hacker News Reader

Yeast Probably Originated in China

theatlantic.com

70 pointskercker28 comments

This is referring to one species of yeast, whereas yeast in general is many millions of years old. This only applies to what is called the Brewer’s Yeast. Yeast as a kind of organism is at least hundreds of millions of years old. As such the title should include the species name, or common name to make clear the truth of this, and prevent confusion.

This is very explicitly contradicted in the article, so your claim is not simply about the inaccuracy of the title. Do you have a cite for your claim?

The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and 1,500 species are currently identified.[1][2][3]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast

Yes it originated hundreds of millions of years ago. And this new research indicates it was probably in China. (The land not the civilisation.)

No, the research says that Saccharomyces cerevisiae probably emerged in China, not all yeast.

I think the point is that the article hopelessly uses the term 'yeast'.

Single celled fungi are likely to be older than our current continental arrangement, the title could clarify that yeast had most likely become domesticated in China, maybe around 4,000 ago, from which all modern domesticated yeast may have descended.

> the title could clarify that yeast had most likely become domesticated in China, maybe around 4,000 ago, from which all modern domesticated yeast may have descended

That’s not what the paper says. The out-of-China event is estimated to be ~15,000 years ago while the various domestication events were only 4,000 years ago. [1]

[1]: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415... see note 4.

This is the most surprising take-away from this article and paper for me. I would have thought a simple pervasive organism like yeast would be millions of years old. But then again I guess there's just as brutal a competition between single celled organisms as it is for complex ones.

edit: As a homebrewer this would also mean that the best place to look for interesting wild strains of yeast for brewing might be in China.

Does it? If you apply that logic to other species I’m not sure it works. What you want is a few populations that have been cut off from the outside long ago, sharing an ancestor but evolving independently. The places I have I mind are the Galapagos island birds, Australian and New Zealand species, Rift Valley fishes and the other I’m sure exist.

Yeast probably is millions of years old; but a species being millions of years old doesn't naturally cause it to spread across the face of the Earth. Sometimes a thing evolves in a niche and can't get out of that niche (despite there being other places it could thrive) because it's surrounded on all sides by inhospitable local habitats.

It's hard to separate what actually came from China, and what didn't come from China. Not that it isn't obvious (I mean really, you invented the spoon -- also claimed by Korea but whatever -- information overload so they have done themselves a disservice.

We'll this is prior to the existence of China, they mean the area now known as China.

Not sure what was going on there 4k-15k years ago?

You haven't talked to Chinese people have you? They will tirelessly parrot out that China has 5000 years of history (it doesn't), because the Middle Kingdom has to be the worlds oldest civilisation - least a billion glass hearts should shatter.

Not sure what was going on there 4k-15k years ago?

Scholarship in ancient Chinese history here. While 'China' as a concept didn't exist, certain forerunners to key cultural traits defining Chinese civilization were in place by 3000BC. This includes agriculture with pigs, chickens and common intensive staple crops, village structures, pottery, warmaking, Sino-Tibetan language,[0] and critically the indisputable development of written Chinese characters.

However, in addition to these there were also distinct, large, parallel, significant cultures with impressive technical achievements, those such as the Shu[1] Kingdom (finally invaded and destroyed by the Qin in 316BC, and only rediscovered in the 1980s) which was known for its masterful large-scale bronze casting, said to be unequaled in human history.

Prior to 2k years ago, it gets messy fast, and notions of "China" are vague, relative and almost untenable. Chiefly because, lacking any large unifying kingdom to provide political, economic, military and cultural unity, it's very difficult to make blanket statements about an area the size of the modern region of China. There were certainly separate cultural spheres from the northeast (circa Korea), the north, the northwest (Xinjiang), Tibet[2], Sichuan, Yunnan/Guizhou/Guangxi, Hainan, the southeast and Taiwan, from which humans launched themselves in to the Pacific to conquer the final part of the planet.[3] We can make sparse suggestions based on suppositions about overall migrations of people and technology, but not much more.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangshao_culture

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shu_(state)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Tibet

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_peoples#Prehistor...

2 questions:

When the dominant state broke down and new states emerged - as in 3 kingdoms, or 16 kingdoms periods - would you always consider a later state to be a successor in title of the state that existed prior to the break up? Is it the language?

>"critically the indisputable development of written Chinese characters." //

What makes the characters Chinese. Italian, for example, uses the Latin character set (though that comes from Greek, which comes from, ...; which may make it a poor analogue). Why aren't they Qin, or Han, or whatever? Is it just imprecise naming.

Agreed. Succession is relative and a grey area, and nomenclature is arbitrary.

I was hoping for inciteful answers .. but accord will do ;o)

Funnily enough https://qz.com/522079/the-long-incredibly-tortuous-and-fasci... popped up in my reading today and dovetailed serendipitously with this discussion, the images of symbol development were particularly interesting to me.

Actual title: "All of the World's Yeast Probably Originated in China"

"Yeast came from China" is the HTML doc title. That's also a legit choice.

I should have noticed that. Thanks for pointing it out. I do think the title on the page is a bit more nuanced.

Ok, we'll use that then. Thanks!

Except the title is absurd, because “all yeast” predates any conceivable ability to trace its precise origin, and has existed at least as long ago as a time when Asia the continent didn’t exist, but was part of Pangaea. Either it’s talking about Saccharomyces cerevisiae or it’s a joke.

If you or anyone can suggest an accurate, neutral title that is 80 chars or less and preferably uses representative language from the article, we'll happily change it again.

“Saccharomyces cerevisiae originated in China circa 12,000BCE”

It didn’t though, yeast is much older than this article claims. For one example. http://www.icr.org/article/a-45-million-year-old-brewers-yea...

45 million years old for that example.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596657/

350 million years old.

The article is saying that all yeast originated in the area we now call China, long before any civilisation appeared there.

It's not saying the Chinese invented it. The Chinese might have been the first to find a use for it. But that's not what this article is about.

The article carelessly switches between 'yeast' and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a specific species of yeast.

...in the area we now call China...

Which was part of the supercontinent Pangea only 250mya, and yeast is probably nearly a billion years old. We’re not even talking about the same crustal surfaces. Given how yeast spreads, what’s the theory for how it was constrained to one small part of a supercontinent?

The article is just awful, and title aside is clearly talking about Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or is just full of shit. The claims of the article make perfect sense for Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which could plausibly have been traced through genetic studies to China. All yeast though? How do you get genetic info from a good sample size over hundreds of millions of years?!

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