Paleolinguistics brings more light on the earliest history of the traditional Eurasian pulse crops

Traditional pulse crops such as pea, lentil, field bean, bitter vetch, chickpea and common vetch originate from Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asia^1^. They were a part of human diets in hunter-gatherers communities^2^ and are one of the most ancient cultivated crops^3,4^. Europe has always been rich in languages^5^, with individual families still preserving common vocabularies related to agriculture^6,7^. The evidence on the early pulse history witnessed by the attested roots in diverse Eurasian proto-languages remains insufficiently clarified and its potential for supporting archaeobotanical findings is still non-assessed. Here we show that the paleolinguistic research may contribute to archaeobotany in understanding the role traditional Eurasian pulse crops had in the everyday life of ancient Europeans. It was found that the Proto-Indo-European language^8,9^ had the largest number of roots directly related to pulses, such as *arnk(')- (a leguminous plant), *bhabh- (field bean), *erəgw[h]- (a kernel of leguminous plant; pea), *ghArs- (a leguminous plant), *kek-, *k'ik'- (pea) and *lent- (lentil)^10,11,12^, numerous words subsequently related to pulses^13,14^ and borrowings from one branch to another^15^, confirming their essential place in the nutrition of Proto-Indo-Europeans^16,17,18^. It was also determined that pea was the most important among Proto-Uralic people^19,20,21^, while pea and lentil were the most significant in the agriculture of Proto-Altaic people^22,23,24^. Pea and bean were most common among Caucasians^25,26^, Basques^27,28^ and their hypothetical common forefathers^29^ and bean and lentil among the Afro-Asiatic ancestors of modern Maltese^30^. Our results demonstrate that pulses were common among the ancestors of present European nations and that paleolinguistics and its lexicological and etymological analysis may be useful in better understanding the earliest days of traditional Eurasian crops. We believe our results could be a basis for advanced multidisciplinary approach to the pulse crop domestication, involving plant scientists, archaeobotanists and linguists, and for reconstructing even earlier periods of pulse history

Breeding for intercropping: join applied genetics and agronomy for improved annual legume production

International audienceArchaeology offers evidence that growing plants together, with annual legumes as usually inevitable component, could be the most ancient cropping system in all primeval agricultural centres. With a ten millennia long tradition, intercropping annual legumes, usually with cereals and for diverse uses, has remained important all over the world until today. There is a phenomenon that brings together legume breeders and agronomists: both are aware that there are differences in the agronomic performance of the mixtures of annual legumes and other field crops if diverse annual legume cultivars are used. Wishing to understand this phenomenon properly and define its economic significance, we are establishing a firm interaction between breeders and agronomists, in order to design such annual legume ideotypes that would have the best agronomic performance when intercropped with diverse plants for either forage or grain or biomass or any other use. Our major hypotheses are that the ideotypes for intercropping are the genotypes being the most competitive in the same environment compartments or taking profit of the complementary compartments. However demanding, this is feasible: the preliminary schemes for forage and grain production, developed mostly at IFVCNS, produced encouraging results in field conditions. Joint efforts of annual legume breeders and agronomists should be beneficial for both scientific community and result in enhancing the legume cultivation and production in general