Ancient chillis

Spices and herbs are stimulants. Not necessarily pharmacological, but sensory: they stimulate our senses of taste and smell in foods that are otherwise bland. The human diet must have gotten a little boring when our ancestors first learned to cultivate grains and root crops and began to lean heavily on these starchy staffs of life, after millions of years of eating this and that as hunter-gatherers. So when did humans start spicing up their monotonous new diet? Very early--in the Americas, even before the widespread use of cooking pots, according to a new report on the archaeology of the chilli "pepper." A group of fifteen scientists led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History published their results in this week's Science.

Chillis (species of Capsicum) originated in the Americas and are not related to the Asian black and other peppers (species of Piper). Perry and colleagues were able to identify ancient starch granules--"microfossils"-- from domesticated species of Capsicum, by their larger size compared to the starch granules of wild plants. Domesticated starch granules were found in settlements in Central and South America going back as much as 6,000 years. This is as old as the earliest possible date for the oldest known chilli macrofossils, fruits found in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico. The most ancient sites are in what is now southwestern Ecuador, which is not thought likely to have been a center of chilli domestication, so the spice was probably domesticated elsewhere even earlier and brought there. The starch granules were found on grinding tools and in food remains along with evidence of maize, achira and arrowroot and manioc (starchy rhizome and root vegetables), squashes, jack beans, and palms. The scientists also found domesticated chilli starch in somewhat later sites across a wide region, from central Panama to the Peruvian Andes, Venezuela, and the Bahamas.

Say Perry and colleagues: "The presence of domesticated plants used as condiments rather than as staple foods during the Preceramic period indicates that sophisticated agriculture and complex cuisines arose early throughout the Americas and that the exploitation of maize, root crops, and chili peppers spread before the introduction of pottery."

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Perry, L. et al. Starch fossils and the domestication and dispersal of chili peppers (Capsicum spp. L.) in the Americas. Science 2007, 315, 986-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1136914