Nature & Environment
Bottle Gourd’s Presence in Americas Explained by Genetic Data
Thomas Carannante
First Posted: Feb 11, 2014 11:51 AM EST
Many scientists have questioned the bottle gourd's presence in North and South America, particularly because there are no wild versions that grow on this side of the world. A new study conducted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History may have an answer for how the green plant got here.
According to genetic data and ocean current analysis, researchers believe that the bottle gourd floated here from Africa about 10,000 years ago. Its many uses and popularity among the pre-Columbian populations across the world have helped press the issue of how it ended up in the Western Hemisphere.
"The bottle gourd's always been an anomaly. It's been puzzling people for a long time," says Bruce Smith, an expert in American plant domestication at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and an author of the new study. Following the analysis of the research, Smith said, "The bottle gourd is no longer an anomaly," in this USA Today article.
Ocean data has suggested that the bottle gourd reached the Americas from Africa in under a year. This occurrence possibly points to the fact that this was when farming was first practiced in the New World. Since there is no history of wild bottle gourds in the Americas, researchers believe that inhabitants of the land began farming the seeds of the bottle gourds to grow more. If proven, this would unveil a distinct time period for when farming began in this part of the world.
Evolutionary molecular biologist Beth A. Shapiro at UC Santa Cruz conducted another similar study that helped support the most recent findings. Further DNA evidence has revealed that the bottle gourds found in the Americas had similar genetic information with those in Africa. This particular finding is important because it differed from a 2005 study that proposed the argument that the bottle gourds arrived in the Americas on the backs of Paleoindians migrating across the Bering. This also helped support many anthropologists' findings of a lack of widespread use of the bottle gourd among Siberians and Alaskans. Click here to read more on Shapiro's study.
The myriad uses of the bottle gourd have contributed to its longstanding interest among researchers in the field. It was used as a drinking vessel, a music instrument, a fishing bob, a medicine bottle, and it provided a source of food. If these findings are accurate, they can be the definitive answers that have been sought out for a long time.
To read more, visit this Los Angeles Times article as well as this USA Today article.
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First Posted: Feb 11, 2014 11:51 AM EST
Many scientists have questioned the bottle gourd's presence in North and South America, particularly because there are no wild versions that grow on this side of the world. A new study conducted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History may have an answer for how the green plant got here.
According to genetic data and ocean current analysis, researchers believe that the bottle gourd floated here from Africa about 10,000 years ago. Its many uses and popularity among the pre-Columbian populations across the world have helped press the issue of how it ended up in the Western Hemisphere.
"The bottle gourd's always been an anomaly. It's been puzzling people for a long time," says Bruce Smith, an expert in American plant domestication at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and an author of the new study. Following the analysis of the research, Smith said, "The bottle gourd is no longer an anomaly," in this USA Today article.
Ocean data has suggested that the bottle gourd reached the Americas from Africa in under a year. This occurrence possibly points to the fact that this was when farming was first practiced in the New World. Since there is no history of wild bottle gourds in the Americas, researchers believe that inhabitants of the land began farming the seeds of the bottle gourds to grow more. If proven, this would unveil a distinct time period for when farming began in this part of the world.
Evolutionary molecular biologist Beth A. Shapiro at UC Santa Cruz conducted another similar study that helped support the most recent findings. Further DNA evidence has revealed that the bottle gourds found in the Americas had similar genetic information with those in Africa. This particular finding is important because it differed from a 2005 study that proposed the argument that the bottle gourds arrived in the Americas on the backs of Paleoindians migrating across the Bering. This also helped support many anthropologists' findings of a lack of widespread use of the bottle gourd among Siberians and Alaskans. Click here to read more on Shapiro's study.
The myriad uses of the bottle gourd have contributed to its longstanding interest among researchers in the field. It was used as a drinking vessel, a music instrument, a fishing bob, a medicine bottle, and it provided a source of food. If these findings are accurate, they can be the definitive answers that have been sought out for a long time.
To read more, visit this Los Angeles Times article as well as this USA Today article.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone