The ancient peoples of Latin America saved these fruits from extinction, which the inhabitants of what we now call Honduras included in their diet at least 10,000 years ago, and improved them intentionally.
Avocades are true superfoods: dense and butter spoonful Vitamins, fat and fiberall in a container of the size of one hand.
We have worked a lot of time for them to be like that. According to an article published on Monday in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the inhabitants of what we call Honduras today They included avocado in their diet at least 10,000 years ago And intentionally improved more than 7500 years ago, first handling wild trees and then planting newly planting, to get thicker skin and larger fruits.
This means that the domestication of the fruit on this site began thousands of years before the arrival of most commonly studied plants, such as corn.
“People domesticated and cultivated their forests” long before planting crops in the fields, said Amber Vanderwarker, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara Campus, and one of the authors of the article.
The avocados first emerged in central Mexico about 400,000 years ago. Originally they were dispersed by the megafauna: the sloth giant terrestrial, the elephantine gonfoterios and the toxodon corpulent swallowed them regularly, including the seed that was a danger of suffocation. At the end of the Pleistocene, about 13,000 years ago, the megafauna had extended the oily fruits by Central America and the north of South America, and had helped them be diversified into at least three different species.
But the mass extinction of the megafauna that ended the Pleistocene left the avocados abandoned: without animals large enough to eat them whole and spread their seeds, their distribution area began to be reduced. At that time, “humans intervened,” said Doug Kennett, professor of environmental archeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara Campus, and another author of the article. Those humans-who, in the absence of the megafauna, now needed new food sources-began to cultivate the fruit, “and saved the avocados,” Kennett said.
For the new study, the researchers focused on a place in western Honduras called El Gigante, a high cave that people began to frequent 11,000 years ago. During generations of life and work there, humans left lots of pumpkin seeds, corn grains, agave leaves and much more. Archaeologists have been examining everything for about 20 years.
Vanderwarker said that, to know how the inhabitants of El Gigante enjoyed the avocados, the researchers examined dozens of their seeds found in this “long -term garbage pile”, as well as thousands of skin fragments. They used radiocarbon dating to put these remains in chronological order, and measured the thickness of the skins and the dimensions of the seeds.
The comparison of seed sizes and skins over time allowed the team to track how humans shape the fruit. At first, people “limited themselves to collecting wild fruits from trees according to their needs,” and the garbage was full of seeds the size of a cherry and fine pieces of skin, said Vanderwarker.
In the layers of about 7500 years ago, the seeds had become larger and the most robust skins. This suggests that people took care of existing trees, rotting some new branches and fruits to encourage the remaining to grow more.
In the layers of 4500 years ago, the seeds had reached the size of the apricot and the thickness of the skin had exceeded the natural variation of the plant, “an indicator that people had begun to store seeds and to plant their own trees,” said Vanderwarker. Arboricultores favored large fruits, as well as thick skins that helped their conservation and transport.
The study contributes “new evidence of more than 10,000 years, probably, for use of avocado,” said Tom Dillehay, a research professor at the University of Vanderbilt, who did not participate in this specific study. He said he had found similar indications of enjoying avocado for a long time in northern Peru; Other evidences have been found in Mexico, Colombia and Panama. Dillehay predicts that, as research continues, more places and more types of manipulated food plants will be discovered.
The finding also continues to shake the idea that food domestication began with animals and cereal grains. That the first avocados growers put so much effort into their plants is “different from what he imagined even 10 or 15 years ago,” Kennett said.
Although our plant cultivation concepts come and go, some things are more timeless. One of the reasons for wanting to cultivate a thick avocado skin is the ease of holding it, said Vanderwarker, which inspires other tasty imaginations: “I think people have probably been eating guacamole for about 10,000 years.”