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Thanks decimon and Bockscar. So extensively is the history of the coconut interwoven with the history of people traveling that Kenneth Olsen, a plant evolutionary biologist, didn't expect to find much geographical structure to coconut genetics when he and his colleagues set out to examine the DNA of more than 1300 coconuts from all over the world... turned out that there are two clearly differentiated populations of coconuts, a finding that strongly suggests the coconut was brought under cultivation in two separate locations, one in the Pacific basin and the other in the Indian Ocean basin... coconut genetics also preserve a record of prehistoric trade routes and of the colonization of the Americas. Thor Heyerdahl contended that coconuts don't arrive alive when they float hundreds of miles in seawater, that they (and the breadfruit trees) had to arrive by boat, with early (probably prehistoric) navigators.
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
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