Ancient peoples of Latin America saved the fleshy fruits from extinction and gradually made them tastier.
Avocados are true superfoods: dense, buttery scoops of vitamins, fat and fiber, all in a hand-size package.
We worked for a long time to make them this way. According to a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people in what we today call Honduras made avocados a part of their diets at least 10,000 years ago and purposefully improved them starting more than 7,500 years ago — first by managing wild trees, and then by selectively planting new ones, to encourage thicker rinds and larger fruit.
This means fruit domestication at this site began thousands of years before the arrival of more commonly studied plants like maize.
“People were domesticating and cultivating their forests” long before they were planting crops in fields, said Amber VanDerwarker, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the paper.
Avocados first arose in central Mexico about 400,000 years ago. They were originally dispersed by megafauna: Giant ground sloths, elephantine gompotheres and burly toxodons all regularly gulped them down, choking-hazard-size pits and all. By the end of the Pleistocene epoch, around 13,000 years ago, megafauna had spread the oily fruits throughout Central and northern South America, and helped them diversify into at least three different species.
But the mass megafaunal extinction that ended the Pleistocene left the avocados stranded: Without animals big enough to eat them whole and spread their seeds, their range began to shrink. At this point, “humans stepped in,” said Doug Kennett, a professor of environmental archaeology also at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an author of the paper. These humans — who, without the megafauna, now needed new food sources — began cultivating the fruit, “saving avocados,” Dr. Kennett said.