Humanity's obsession with chocolate may go back much further than we thought. Some delicious new research.

Pedro_P

We go way back.
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▼ Halloween is tomorrow, and there will be hordes of children (and adults) stuffing their faces with  chocolateof all kinds all over the place—a reminder that humans have a pretty personal relationship with this delightfully sweet candy. And now it looks like that relationship started further back then we imagined. New evidence reported in Nature Ecology &  Evolution on Mondaysuggests that the cacao tree, from which we collect cocoa beans to make chocolate, was domesticated by humans in South America more than 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. This would push back cocoa bean domestication to 5,400 years ago, making this new discovery the oldest archeological evidence of domesticated cacao in the world, and would also peg the origin point of cocoa production to the upper Amazon of South America, not Central America as was once thought.
The new findings paint a more complicated and deeper picture of humans’ relationship with cacao, one of the world’s biggest economic crops to date. “The story of cacao is a rich story, of the history of a plant that in its domestic form is a gift to the world from the people who transformed it through generations of labor and careful tending,” says Michael Blake, an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a coauthor of the new study. “This story can be repeated with an almost endless list of foods and materials that the world takes for granted today, but whose origins we seldom know much about and rarely appreciate.”
Cacao probably wasn’t used by those old civilizations to make edible chocolate, but tests show the indigenous populations living in the Amazon all those years ago were definitely using the cacao seed, part of the greater pod used to make chocolate itself. Spanish explorers arriving in Central America in the late 15th century found native people using cacao to make hold and cold beverages, drying and roasting and grinding the seeds into a paste to extract out the active ingredients like caffeine. By the next century, Spain and other countries were importing troves of cacao into the European continent.
Indigenous people in the Amazon today still use cacao to make fermented drinks. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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tuli08@

wow...yummy.. i mean interesting:-p