Ecto Cooler is, at least genetically, and generally, decently sativa dominant. About 65/35. However, of its 3 most common phenotypes, only one actually has what most smokers expect a sativa dominant hybrid’s effects to be, & even that pheno has a fairly strong indica dominant second half. The other 2 most common phenos have such strongly indica influenced effects that they barely seem to be hybrids at all. The more common of the two common indica dominant phenos will give you couch lock more potent than the majority of much more indica leaning crosses, as well as a fair share of pure or nearly pure indicas. Which is why these reviews are all over the place and seem to contradict each other often. There’s several hybrids like this, with similar, apparently contradictory effect profiles relative to their genetic composition, and often in their most commonly found phenotypes.
There’s a few rare phenos as well, as there are for all hybrids, although the most inbred, heavily worked, typically only found in double digit filial descendant forms, which are so consistent, their recessive, unusual, & rare phenotypes are extremely hard to find. Skunk #1 is a really good example of a heavily worked IBL, crossbred to stabilize its effects so many times, the only seeds available are ridiculously compounded IBLs - the seeds made available were already F12s or close, and that was in the 1980’s when the cultivar’s seeds were first introduced into the wild for everyone to enjoy. Now there are likely versions of Skunk #1 that are F30s or more.
It’s not unusual for longtime, multigenerational farms, run by hash producing families that go back generations and generations, to make seeds every year to grow a fresh crop the next. While most of these plants are typically classified as landraces, they could easily be from seeds that represent IBLs in rhe F200s or F300s or more. In many traditional hash producing regions, certain cultivars have been used for hundreds of years. While human selection definitely drives the offspring to have mostly predictable traits, landraces also have interbred among isolated populations for hundreds or even thousands of years. All cannabis is feral.
It was indisputably the first crop cultivated by humans, long before they cultivated any food crops, & were intentionally split into two main types at least over 6,000 years ago, & the many years of intentional breeding selection that divided cannabis into fiber-producing hemp cultivars, selected for their fiber strength, length, and other characteristics of hemp that make its bast fibers such a valuable resource, & into psychotropic, high-THC medicinal/drug cultivars likely happened much earlier, & was done multiple times in several different regions.
If farming and plant cultivation the associated settlement founding that led to what we call cities as well as civilization in general occurred about 12,000 years ago, primarily with food crops, cannabis cultivation was happening much earlier than that, although stands were likely left to their own devices for the majority of their 3-7 month lifecycles, depending on the cultivar, since people weren’t settling down so often yet. & we’re still primarily nomadic. They likely planted several stands of cannabis along their migration routes since they weren’t always sure where they’d be when it was harvest time. They also carried and smoked cannabis with them as they followed wild herds, tossing the seeds aside.
Thanks to these and similar practices, cannabis spread to every corner of the globe, where the climate and ecosystem caused the many different geographically isolated types of cannabis to adapt over the millennia, giving us the abundance of distinct varietals and cultivars our modern hybrids are bred from. Although the short-sighted human attempts to eradicate cannabis completely in the 20th century led to the total annihilation of over 70% of all cannabis cultivars worldwide- and in Europe and North America specifically, caused the total destruction of almost all local landrace cultivars. There’s only 4-5 definitive American landraces left, & a couple are extremely rare, found only on a single mountain or island. European cannabis fared slightly better but not much, with the exception of Ruderalis, which isn’t very appealing to anyone on its own, considered a weed in the regions it’s naturally found in, & was thus mostly spared this genocide.
While there are likely still a few examples left of wild cannabis in the forests of Northern China, where scientists only recently definitively determined is the region that cannabis originally came from, after centuries of the belief that cannabis evolved in the Himalayan lowlands, due to the overwhelming prevalence of traditional hash producing and consuming countries and communities in the region. But mysterious, potential, original stands of wild cannabis are still only hypothetical. That’s how long humans and cannabis have shared a common destiny - long enough that all the different landraces of cannabis in the world are feral, & descended from cultivated varieties for so long that some landraces were getting close to becoming their own independent species of flowering plant, unable to produce viable offspring with other cannabis cultivars. But fortunately for all the diverse hybrids in the world, none ever quite reached that point - at least not any that have been discovered to date.