FOSSILS ET AL.

Avocados Were Domesticated 7,500 Years Ago According To Fossil Evidence

The ancient peoples of Latin America did us all a tremendous favor by saving avocados from extinction and gradually making them tastier over thousands of years of domestication.

© by GrrlScientist for Forbes | LinkTr.ee

(Credit: Markus via Pexels / CC0, Public domain)

Avocados, Persea americana, have been an important part of peoples’ diets throughout the Americans for thousands of years. A treasure trove of fossils unearthed from an ancient rock shelter in Honduras finds humans were eating avocados as long as 11,000 years ago, and they were actively farming avocado trees as early as 7,500 years ago. This discovery suggests that farming avocado trees prepared the Indigenous peoples of Central and South America to later grow domesticated field crops like corn.

“These people literally domesticated their forests,” said the study’s lead author, anthropologist Amber VanDerwarker, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor VanDerwarker is an expert in ancient plants and agriculture.

This discovery rewrites our understanding about the beginnings of farming. Originally, most…