Where Fruits and Tree Crops Began

The modern watermelon was first domesticated in Sudan, and wild watermelon seeds have been found at the prehistoric site of Uan Muhuggiag in Libya, so the path starts in northeastern Africa.

Olive domestication and early pressing are both attested archaeologically in the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, long before oil became the defining fat of Mediterranean cooking and of ceremonial use.

The apple tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor Malus sieversii still grows. Domesticated in the Tian Shan mountains, it is thought to have traveled the Silk Road to Europe.

The lemon is a hybrid of the citron and the bitter orange. Its origin is uncertain, with some evidence pointing to northeastern India in the first millennium BC.

The mango originated between northwestern Myanmar, Bangladesh and northeastern India, and has been cultivated across South and Southeast Asia since ancient times in two cultivar lineages.

Almost all edible bananas descend from two wild species and were probably first domesticated in New Guinea, where phytoliths from the Kuk Swamp site date to roughly 10,000 to 6,500 years ago.

The coconut has a disputed center of domestication. The traditional view holds a single Indo-Pacific origin spread by Austronesian seafarers, while genetic research proposes independent Pacific and Indian Ocean centers.

The avocado is native to the Americas from Mexico to Peru, and archaeological evidence shows people using it for thousands of years across Central and South America.

Cacao was domesticated in the upper Amazon, not first in Mesoamerica as long assumed: cacao starch grains, theobromine residues and ancient DNA about 5,300 years ago at the Santa Ana-La Florida site in southeast Ecuador, reported in 2018, are the earliest evidence of its use in the Americas. Mesoamerican peoples, including the Olmec, prepared cacao drinks later, with residues from the Early Formative period, and a genome study found that Criollo cacao was strongly domesticated about 3,600 years ago.