Posted on 08/11/2022 8:09:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The oldest known seeds from a watermelon relative, dating back 6,000 years to the Neolithic period, were found during an archaeological dig in Libya. An investigation of these seeds led by biologist Susanne S. Renner at Washington University in St. Louis reveals some surprises about how our ancestors used a predecessor of today’s watermelon...
Scientists generally agree that watermelons came from Africa, but exactly where and when watermelons with red, sweet flesh were first domesticated from their wild form is debatable. The most recent data point to watermelon getting its start in the Nile valley, which is consistent with archaeological evidence.
However, the very old seeds discovered at Uan Muhuggiag, a rock shelter in what is now the Sahara Desert in Libya, seemed at odds with this explanation. There was no way to be certain of their identity prior to this investigation...
Co-senior author Guillaume Chomicki, a National Environmental Research Council fellow at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, collected dozens of samples of watermelon and watermelon relatives from herbarium specimens in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as part of the quest to trace the path of watermelon’s domestication.
He and Renner also obtained much older samples: the 6,000-year-old Libyan seeds and another set of 3,300-year-old Sudanese seeds...
The scientists generated genome sequences from the seeds from Libya and Sudan and from the herbarium collections, and analyzed these data together with resequenced genomes from important germplasm collections. They discovered that the oldest seeds came from a plant known as an egusi melon, a watermelon relative that is currently restricted to western Africa.
(Excerpt) Read more at source.wustl.edu ...
An unexpected new insight from this study is that Citrullus appears to have initially been collected or cultivated for its seeds, not its sweet flesh, consistent with seed damage patterns induced by human teeth in the oldest Libyan material.Image courtesy of Molecular Biology and Evolution
An early version of Jurassic Park featured watermelons instead of dinosaurs. It did not go over well with test audiences so they had to add CGI dinosaurs to improve the chase scenes.
Same thing happened during the making of the first Indiana Jones movie.
Can these seeds be germinated?.......................
That’s what she said.
Interesting!
I tried Tigerella one year, didn’t work out. Years before I’d tried the Galia and a couple of supposedly tasty French melons, bupkis. OTOH, back when I was younger and fitter, I successfully grew Black Diamond, and in a different year Moon & Stars (or maybe it was yellow fleshed Moon & Stars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citron_melon
I mistook one of these for a watermelon once...................
In the 1950's my dad grew a Black Diamond watermelon that won the regional large watermelon prize that year. Congressman Frank Boykin took it and claims to have given the watermelon to president Truman.
This is one of the ways I earned money as a teenager.(That's a familiar scene to me, even today around here)
The version with killer tomatoes, however, did well.
I’ve got a volunteer crop of Indian jewel corn growing on our little farm (vineyard) in Israel. My daughters planted a crop years ago and then grew up and abandoned it when they went to college.
Beautiful but just tastes like corn. Probably deemed an invasive species in Israel but I’m going to leave it alone. Bugs don’t bother it.
Slowly spreading down a gully.
I would question how unexpected this really was as its similar to the story of the squash. When we encountered it, it seemed obvious that those primitives were doing it all wrong. The selections seemed to be for seeds so we improved it until it had a much higher ratio of flesh. Subsequently it was discovered that the intent of a squash was a protein storage device, not a fruit based sugar storage system.
I’ve seen the ears, they’re gorgeous, but I think that’s probably a flint corn.
Seedy, not sweet: The Joe Biden Story.
:^) It’s a variety better suited for the south, melons in general do better with a longer growing season. This year we’re having a great year for field corn, rains a couple of times a week, blazing hot other days. You could almost build treehouses in these things.
The primitives are the ones who wildcrafted it into both. :^)
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