Siberian Land Bridge? The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria? Who needs help when you can float from continent to continent by the current of the ocean? That's how scientists believe bottle gourds or calabash made their way from Africa to North and South America over 10,000 years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported.
One of the first domesticated plants, bottle gourds were used by ancient peoples (and still used today) as food, canteens, rafts, instruments, and more, according to National Geographic.
A new study published Monday compared the DNA of gourds in Europe/Asia and Africa, where they were first cultivated, to both current and ancient (10,000 years old) strains from North, Central, and South America. Having been cultivated thousands of years before, the samples from Eurasia and Africa were vastly different, but the samples from modern and ancient America were genetically more similar to strains currently grown in Africa as well as those still growing in the wild (which are rare in today's world, according to Nat Geo).
Once researchers confirmed their African lineage, they used ocean current models to determine if gourd seeds could have feasibly traveled with the sea and onto the shores of the U.S. and South America's southeastern coasts. Given that seeds lose their growing powers after a year in the sea and that the models estimated the travel time between a few months and 330 days, the theory is the most likely explanation for gourds' spread from Africa to the Americas.
According to Nat Geo, scientists believe bottle gourds spread took a similar oceanic path 60,000 years ago (around the same time humans migrated into the rest of the Old World) from Ethiopia to Asia and Eastern Europe. Some travelers from Africa moving east may have brought the bottle gourds with them, but it is also likely that the seeds traveled before or with them through the water. Those strains, however, were cultivated for many more years than the ones in the Americas; thus, their greater genetic differences.
