I clipped this some time ago to add to a site I work on, but it is a great one for this thread also:

5,200-year-old grains in the eastern Altai Mountains redate trans-Eurasian crop exchange

Most people are familiar with the historical Silk Road, but fewer people realize that the exchange of items, ideas, technology, and human genes through the mountain valleys of Central Asia started almost three millennia before organized trade networks formed. These pre-Silk Road exchange routes played an important role in shaping human cultural developments across Europe and Asia, and facilitated the dispersal of technologies such as horse breeding and metal smelting into East Asia. One of the most impactful effects of this process of ancient cultural dispersal was the westward spread of northeast Asian crops and the eastward spread of southwest Asian crops.

http://www.geologypage.com/2020/02/5200-year-old-grains-in-the-eastern-altai-mountains-redate-trans-eurasian-crop-exchange.html