Some 2.5 million years ago, southwestern China may have had peaches before humans inhabited the region.
According to Live Science, a team of researchers detailed fossilized peach cores discovered in China's Yunnan province at a construction site. The rocks in which the fossils were embedded dated back to the Pliocene epoch, which began about 5.3 million years ago and ended 2.6 million years ago.
The researchers published a study on their findings in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
"The peach is an important part of human history, and it's important to understand how it became what it is today," study co-author Peter Wilf, a professor of paleobotany at Pennsylvania State University, said in a press release. "If we know the origins of our resources we can make better use of them.
"Is the peach we see today something that resulted from artificial breeding under agriculture since prehistory, or did it evolve under natural selection? The answer is really both."
Peaches today are likely larger than the ones that existed millions of years ago, which were probably up to two inches in diameter. Predating humans in that region, primates and human ancestors were likely responsible for eating the peaches and dispensing seeds elsewhere.
"The peach was a witness to the human colonization of China," Wilf said. "It was there before humans, and through history we adapted to it and it to us.
"If you imagine the smallest commercial peach today, that's what these would look like.
"It's something that would have had a fleshy, edible fruit around it. It must have been delicious."
