Posted on 10/04/2005 7:45:50 AM PDT by Junior
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first cultivated potato was grown in what is now Peru, researchers said on Monday, and it originated only once, not several times, as some experts had proposed.
Their genetic study shows the first potato known to have been farmed is genetically closest to a species now found only in southern Peru, the U.S. and British researchers said.
"This result shows the potato originated one time and from a species that was distributed in southern Peru," said David Spooner, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Wisconsin who, led the study.
The findings challenge theories that potatoes were first cultivated in Bolivia or Argentina, or that farmers bred them several different times in several different places.
"The origin of crop plants has long fascinated botanists, archaeologists, and sociologists with the following fundamental questions: When, where, how, why, and how many times did crop domestication occur? What are the wild progenitors of these crops?" they wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study did not address when the first potato would have been cultivated, but other research suggests it would have been between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Potatoes are a major food staple around the world and mostly belong to a single species, Solanum tuberosum. Baking potatoes, red potatoes, golden potatoes and other favorites all originated in southern Chile, neighboring Peru, Spooner said in a telephone interview.
The Chilean potato that gave rise to modern potatoes is probably a hybrid of the ancestral Peruvian potato and a wild species found in Bolivia and Argentina, Spooner said.
But in South America, many other cultivated potatoes are eaten. "There are many different colors -- solid and mottled and dotted from white to tan to purple to red," Spooner said.
Fossil potatoes dating back 7,000 years have been found.
For their study, Spooner and colleagues did genetic comparisons of 261 wild relatives of potatoes and 98 so-called landrace types, which are primitive cultivated crops grown by indigenous peoples.
The U.S. and British researchers believe their findings show a single species, S. bukasovii, gave rise to first known cultivated potato. It would not have closely resembled the big, pale fleshy tubers that people crave today, Spooner said.
"The wild species, many of them have tubers -- the potato part you eat -- that is tiny, sometimes the size of a pea," he said. "Oftentimes they are mildly poisonous."
we called 'em SQUIDS...........
Huh?
All my life it has been a given that the potato originated in South America and nowhere else.
Have there been other possibilities ever proposed? If there are, I was unaware of them.
He must have written off his navy enlistment as a youthful folly. (:>)
and some patrol boats and didn't re-enlist, but changed services instead.........
Or the sight of real boats made him nervous... ;^)>
Did he avoid getting hit by rice shrapnel? I heard others weren't so lucky.
No, he hid behind Kerry's ego............
I don't get it. I grew up out west. Well, west of I 495 and Sturbridge, MA.
"Fossil potatoes dating back 7,000 years have been found."
But now for the BIG question. What was the date of the first potatoe chip??
The only potatoes we grew or had were the red "Irish " or "New" potatoes. I'd never even seen any other kind............Hell, I'd never even eaten or seen broccoli or cauliflower until I joined the Marine Corps.........
I think that was meant as a joke.
WOW.
Good man, neat story.
OK, lol, now I get it.
Didn't we know this already? I think I recall learning this many years ago in gradeschool. We'll probably be growing potatoes on Mars; if you think about it, potatoes might do very well.
My response was satirical...
There were no "real" potatoes until farmers in the Upper Snake River Valley of Idaho began growing Russet spuds hybridized by Luther Burbank. Anything before that was inedible pig forage. They're still the only "real" potatoes. Even Burbank Russets grown anywhere else are wet squishy look-alikes. It's the volcanic micronutrients in the Idaho soil that give Idaho Russets their unique and wonderful character.
The best botanists that the world ever produced lived on the west coast of South America before Columbus arrived. IMHO
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