Millet is not one crop but a grab bag of only distantly related grasses
Pearl millet, finger millet, proso, fonio and Job's tears all share a name, yet they come from different tribes and even different subfamilies of grasses. What unites them is small seeds and toughness in heat and drought. Some of the world's oldest known grain storage pits, in northern China, held millet.
Most millets sit in the grass tribe Paniceae, including pearl, proso, foxtail, fonio and kodo millets. Finger millet belongs to a different subfamily altogether, sorghum is sometimes called great millet, and teff is often excluded from the club. As a group they are close cousins of maize and sorghum and more distant relatives of wheat and barley. The word traces back through Old French and Latin to an Indo-European root meaning to crush.
At Cishan in northern China, storage pits alongside pit-houses and pottery contain proso millet traces dated to around 10,300 to 8,700 years ago, with foxtail millet appearing about 8,700 years ago. A famous 2005 find of 4,000-year-old noodles at Lajia, reported as millet, was later questioned by other Chinese researchers who doubted the method. Chinese myth credits the crop to the legendary emperor Shennong and to Hou Ji, whose name means Lord Millet. Asian millets reached the Black Sea region by 5000 BC, and proso spread from Ukraine to Italy, central Europe and northern Germany between about 1500 and 1200 BC.
Other millets had their own origins. Finger millet came from the East African highlands, and pearl millet was domesticated in the West African Sahel from a wild grass, perhaps as early as 6000 BC by one tentative estimate, reaching India by around 2000 to 1700 BC. Kodo and little millet were domesticated on the Indian subcontinent, and Vedic texts name several kinds. Hesiod mentioned millet sown in summer, and Theophrastus listed it beside wheat.
Millets matter most across the semi-arid tropics of Asia and Africa, where their short season and reliability on poor, dry soils beat most other grains; with irrigation and fertiliser, yields can rise two to four times. One success story, the variety Okashana 1, bred in India from a Burkina Faso millet, doubled yields and became Namibia's most popular type after its 1990 release. The United Nations declared 2023 the International Year of Millets.
Source: Millet
