Coming off of one of my worse weekends, let's talk China's worst export: millet. During the Bronze Age, Saraceni is [1/29] informing us broomcorn millet was used in pastes and puddings in what we're calling "China". There wasn't any such entity as "China" over there at the time, although Erlitou looks like a candidate for what preceded the Shang state.
Along the Silk Road, from Samarkand to the Indus, they were feeding millet to cows. I've got to assume similar for Tibet; I just know what the five preLhasa Tibetan peoples weren't eating namely wheat. The Silk Road started eating millets 2700-1500 BC.
This is borne out in the "Xinjiang" Taklamakan fringe 1700 BC to AD 700, eminently Silk Road at that time. The locals were eating millet in breads. They were not eating the sticky porridges. The Taklamakan couldn't! Shang broomcorn doesn't share genetics with points west.
So, I take it, older broomcorns got west before Erlitou then the Shang had bred something they'd eat. Everyone was feeding that stuff to their flocks, like so much alfalfa. It was later that the east got a version for humans. By then, the west had figured out the bread process - I suspect, at first for millet beers. Then the west moved to breads. No more millet imports were needed, so the great central-Asian cities didn't bother.
MASSIVE BACKDATE 1/30
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