> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.