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taylorvich writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-spicy-history-chili-peppers.html

The history of the chili pepper is in some ways the history of humanity in the Americas, says Dr. Katherine Chiou, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of Alabama.

As a paleoethnobotanist, Chiou studies the long-term relationship between people and plants through archaeological remains. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Chiou outlines evidence that the domestication of Capsicum annum var. annum, the species responsible for most commercially available chilies, occurred in a different region of Mexico than has been previously believed.

[...] Two things emerged. First, Tamaulipas, the region assumed to be the origin of this Capsicum species, did not have conditions that would support wild chili pepper growth in the Holocene era, the time when domestication appears to have begun. The data indicate that the lowland area near the Yucatán Peninsula and southern coastal Guerrero is a more likely candidate for first encounters between wild Capsicum and early humans.

Second, and potentially more interesting, is that chili pepper domestication is not a firmly drawn boundary. "We think domestication was around 10,000 years ago or earlier," said Chiou. "But through Postclassic Maya times, which is relatively late in the cultural history of the region, we see this continuum between wild and domestic."

Usually, domesticated plants are kept mostly separate from their wild progenitors, but chilies appear to have continually been interbred with wild varieties until quite recently. Some wild varieties are still consumed today, like the chiltepin in the southwestern U.S., and many more varieties are curated by native peoples in Mexico. It's a messy story, but that may not be a bad thing.

Journal Reference: K.L. Chiou, A. Lira-Noriega, E. Gallaga, C.A. Hastorf, A. Aguilar-Meléndez, Interdisciplinary insights into the cultural and chronological context of chili pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum L.) domestication in Mexico, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 121 (47) e2413764121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2413764121 (2024).

Original Submission