Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Ancient South Americans domesticated and consumed cacao, the plant from which chocolate is made, long before other people did, a new study finds.
Artifacts with traces of cacao suggest that an Amazonian culture located in what’s now Ecuador developed a wide-ranging taste for cacao products between 5,450 and 5,300 years ago, researchers report online October 29 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Societies in southern Mexico and Central America, such as the Olmec and Maya, didn’t start concocting their better known and more intensively studied chocolatey drinks for roughly another 1,500 years.
“This is not only the earliest archaeological evidence so far reported for cacao use in the Americas, but also the only archaeological evidence for cacao use in South America,” says study coauthor and anthropological archaeologist Michael Blake of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
For more than a decade, reports of heightened genetic diversity among present-day domesticated cacao plants in South America’s upper Amazon region — near where the artifacts were found — have suggested that domesticated cacao (Theobroma cacao) originated there. Differences in the genetic makeup of related populations of organisms accumulate gradually, so populations displaying the most DNA diversity are presumed to have evolved first. The new study confirms that genetic scenario for cacao for the first time at an…
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