Humans have been eating fruit, vegetables, and meat for a long, long time, so long in
fact, that what we put into our mouths has been evolving alongside us.
Let's examine some foods that look completely different from what they used to.
In the seventeenth century, Italian still life painter Giovanni Stanchi painted a scene
with peaches, pears, and some other fruit, including a super weird-looking thing in the
lower right corner.
It's a good thing for us that he made that particular artistic choice, because it gives
us a glimpse into what he knew as a watermelon.
It turns out that if you hate seeds, you'd have hated 17th century watermelons.
Centuries-old artwork can provide a fascinating glimpse into what fruits and vegetables looked
like before we started selectively cultivating them.
Watermelon, for example, came from Africa and likely was a familiar garden staple in
Europe by the 1600s.
The flesh probably didn't taste much different from today's watermelon, and it would've been
a super sweet treat.
Over the next few centuries, gardeners started selectively breeding watermelons to have more
of the bright red flesh and less of the white rind.
We all know what a banana looks like today.
But if you peeled one of the wild ancestors of today's modern fruits, you might be in
for a surprise.
Let's just say that if you suffer from a fear of holes, your flight response would kick
into high gear.
Fortunately for us, modern bananas have been hybridized, cultivated, and domesticated into
the soft, squishy fruits we all know and love.
"That's right, Britta.
It's a banana."
It's a process that started somewhere around 13,500 to 10,700 years ago in areas like Sri
Lanka and China.
The oldest signs of people taking wild bananas and turning them into a legitimate crop come
from Papua New Guinea, and they've likely changed form so many times that it's impossible
to document them all.
Interestingly enough, it's possible we'll see another shift in the banana in the near
future.
The banana we eat today is the Cavendish, which replaced the Gros Michel in 1947 after
an outbreak of the devastating Panama disease.
But considering that these sterile, cloned bananas are very susceptible to a new strain
of fungus called Tropical Race 4, we might be on the brink of a whole new banana, hopefully
one with no holes.
Today's apples are delicious, huge and brightly colored, ranging from super sweet to super
tart.
But none of these apples grow in the wild, and it took a ton of careful cultivation to
get those varieties we take for granted every time we go to the supermarket.
But it turns out that the ancient ancestor of Granny Smith and Honeycrisp is still out
there, at least for now.
It's called Malus sieversii, and it seems to only grow wild in the forests of Kazakhstan,
where they're eaten and spread by bears.
It's one of four likely keystone ancestors of modern apples, and it's very small but
very sweet.
A single wild tree might have a rainbow of different-colored apples, and they'll even
taste different, too.
Malus sieversii were domesticated somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, alongside
a few other varieties that grew wild alongside the Silk Road.
Unfortunately, as they began to be cultivated for flavor, size, and uniformity, they also
lost some of their tolerance for things like disease and changing climates.
Going back to the forests of Kazakhstan and re-sampling some of the ancient apples that
grow there might unlock new potential for breeding hardier, still-delicious apples,
and we might just see another shift in this lunchtime staple.
"How do you like them apples?!"
Corn has come a long way since farmers in Mexico began selecting kernels from the biggest
and best ears to plant for the next season.
Those first steps toward domestication happened around 10,000 years ago, and it happened surprisingly
quickly.
A few theories on the domestication of corn have been put forward.
The most popular is that it started as a genetic mutation of the teosinte, a grass that has
kernels that not only look similar to corn, but that can cross-breed with today's corn
and produce viable offspring.
Researchers have determined that there are only five genes that are different between
teosinte and corn, in spite of their differences in appearance.
Wild teosinte kernels are small, hard seeds that grow in long spikes of only five to seven
rows, while corn has lost those hard seeds and replaced them with husks that prevent
reproduction without interference.
If you hate shucking a dozen ears of corn for dinner, imagine needing to shatter the
kernel of hundreds of teosinte spikes for a meal!
When it comes to milestones in the development of humankind, the shift from hunting and gathering
to domestication and agriculture is a pretty big one.
Archaeologists and historians are still a little unclear about just how that all happened,
but they are fairly certain pigs were domesticated early on, and independently in different areas.
Humankind was living alongside, and eating, pigs around 10,000 years ago, and people in
Eastern Turkey seem to have been the first to do it.
The pigs that first made our ancestors salivate were nothing like the modern pigs we today
turn into bacon sandwiches.
Researchers have been able to trace modern pig DNA back to their wild boar ancestors.
Different pigs have been linked to different wild boar populations, but comparing 6,000-year
old skulls from pigs and wild boars shows that the domesticated versions were getting
smaller and easier to handle.
Just how domestication happened is still debated, but it's generally agreed that some hunters
might've started realizing it was easier to keep pigs at home instead of going out to
look for them.
Thus, they started breeding the ones with better dispositions.
Eventually, those more docile pigs created lines of piglets that were even more docile
than the last, eventually giving us the pigs we know and love to eat today.
"Bacon?!
Gotta get that bacon!"
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