Pumpkins May Have Become Extinct Without Early American Farmers

Without us, pumpkins and squashes may have gone extinct in North America. These wild gourds, belonging to the genus Cucurbita, were bitter before becoming domesticated, and may not have survived after the extinction of large herbivores, such as the mastodon.

Today, pumpkins, squash and other gourds are used in soups, breads, and as general flavoring in other foods. They're usually sweet when cooked, and don't have the bitter flavor that their wild ancestors did.

In this latest study, researchers conducted genetic analysis of 91 ancient and modern gourds. This revealed that humans began cultivating the plants nearly 10,000 years ago.

Wild gourds are actually very bitter. That's why the researchers tested 46 mammal genomes for a gene linked to tasting bitterness. Smaller mammals had higher levels of the gene, which means that they probably avoided wild pumpkins. However, megafauna, like mastodons and other large mammals, actually had less of the gene. Most likely, these large mammals helped spread the seeds of gourds.

This means that when these large mammals died off, it was only because human domesticated the gourds that they likely survived.

"There was probably a long-term retreat of wild populations into ecological refugia, habitat zones that were able to support the wild plants even in changing conditions," said Logan Kistler, one of the researchers of the new study, in an interview with PopSci. However, some of the wild types of gourds disappeared altogether. He continued by saying "one of the common types of canned pumpkin that a lot of people in the U.S. will be opening up for pies this season has no known wild counterpart [today]."

The findings show that humans may have just saved pumpkins and gourds from extinction through cultivation.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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