Before the 1970s, cannabis strains were landrace varieties that were grown natively in places like Mexico, Thailand, India, Jamaica, or Morocco. Cannabis hybrids didn’t exist back then, so the marijuana strains doing the rounds were pure indicas or sativas.
The sativa strains of that time had very long flowering periods because they had adapted to the regions close to the equator. Therefore, when some young Americans decided to grow them in their colder regions, they found a huge problem: these plants were finishing their flowering period too late, in November or even December.
This fact, added to the cold and rainy weather conditions of some regions in the USA, meant that reaching harvest time successfully was a big challenge for some growers. That’s why they decided to cross these pure sativa strains, from places like Oaxaca or Sinaloa (Mexico) and Santa Marta (Colombia), with landrace cannabis seeds that they’d brought back from India. These were indica genetics with short flowering periods which were better adapted to more arid climates.
So that’s how the first cannabis hybrids were born, including the renowned Skunk#1, which became the backbone for the creation of countless other strains, such as Cheese.
The current era of modern cannabis hybrids was started this way, with breeders carrying out crosses between different strains to unite the best of them and create truly special varieties.
Nowadays, you can still find some pure sativas on the market (although this is not very common), as well as many strains catalogued as ‘sativa-dominant’, meaning that sativa genes are predominant in their genetics.
