the sycamore tree. Langdon argues that the Spanish may have encountered a similar-sounding native word for bananas already growing in parts of South America. At least one pre-Columbian term that may indicate so has already been deciphered: Scientists reconstructing a Mayan dialect in the 1940s concluded that a plátano sound-alike was, in fact, present during the pre-European period of that culture.
The case in favor of the bananaâs early presence in North America was further bolstered in 2007. Early in that year, archaeologists working in Chile found fifty prehistoric chicken bones during a dig near the Arauco Peninsula. The site is as close to Easter Island as any point in the Americas and a feasible jump for the exceptionally skilled marine adventurers who settled the Pacific. When DNA was compared to genetic material from prehistoric chicken remains collected in Tonga and Samoa, scientists got a direct match. The time line for travel from Rapa Nui to South America fits perfectly with the patterns of settlement that brought people to the farthest reaches of the South Pacific: Easter Island was settled sometime between eight hundred and one thousand years ago. The Arauco bones date just a little bit later; theyâre between six hundred and seven hundred years old. But thereâs little trace of migrating people âno human bones, no artifacts other than the Ecuadorian ones that appear to be from Asiaâin South America. If Polynesians or Asians came all the way here, where did they go? It turns out that throughout history Pacific wanderers have rarely settled where people already lived. Native tribes have inhabited coastal South America for thousands of years. But the early navigators could have made briefer staysâstays that were never meant to be permanent (the Vikings did the same thing, around the same time, in North America). Whether they planned to take up residence or not, the renewable food resources weâre pretty sure they brought, sweet potatoes and egg-laying chickens, would almost certainly have been accompanied by the most reliable long-distance traveler of all.
THEN AGAIN, IF THAT BANANA didnât arrive in the Americas, if Polynesians were not roasting chickens along the western edge of South America, then the progression of bananas from many in Asia to a good number in the Pacific to a few in Africa only continued to the Americas with the advent of the modern world.
Either way, in 2016 the banana associated with European husbandry will celebrate its five hundredth birthday in our hemisphere. If the from-the-Pacific theory is discounted, those bananas, the ancestors of our plantains, were brought to the Americas by just a single person. Once they arrived, the fruit moved with a velocity that would become a hallmark of the expansion of the New World. It took just decades for the starchy staple to extend across a continent.
âOne hears on all sides that this special kind [of fruit] was brought from the Island of the Gran Canaria in the year 1516 by the Reverend Father Friar Tomás de Berlanga of the Order of Predicadores, to this city of Santo Domingo, whence they spread to the other settlements of this Island and to all the islands peopled by Christians. And they have been carried to the mainland, and in every port they flourished,â wrote Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, royal historian to the Spanish court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in his 1526 Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (Santo Domingo is today the Dominican Republic). The fruit didnât become an African-like staple in Latin America, but it came fairly close and remains so today: A serving of cooked green banana is an essential part of any meal in most of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Nurtured by farmers, and carried by sailors, merchants, conquerors, and pioneers, the banana took seven thousand years to complete its circle around the globe. By the time the United States was
The case in favor of the bananaâs early presence in North America was further bolstered in 2007. Early in that year, archaeologists working in Chile found fifty prehistoric chicken bones during a dig near the Arauco Peninsula. The site is as close to Easter Island as any point in the Americas and a feasible jump for the exceptionally skilled marine adventurers who settled the Pacific. When DNA was compared to genetic material from prehistoric chicken remains collected in Tonga and Samoa, scientists got a direct match. The time line for travel from Rapa Nui to South America fits perfectly with the patterns of settlement that brought people to the farthest reaches of the South Pacific: Easter Island was settled sometime between eight hundred and one thousand years ago. The Arauco bones date just a little bit later; theyâre between six hundred and seven hundred years old. But thereâs little trace of migrating people âno human bones, no artifacts other than the Ecuadorian ones that appear to be from Asiaâin South America. If Polynesians or Asians came all the way here, where did they go? It turns out that throughout history Pacific wanderers have rarely settled where people already lived. Native tribes have inhabited coastal South America for thousands of years. But the early navigators could have made briefer staysâstays that were never meant to be permanent (the Vikings did the same thing, around the same time, in North America). Whether they planned to take up residence or not, the renewable food resources weâre pretty sure they brought, sweet potatoes and egg-laying chickens, would almost certainly have been accompanied by the most reliable long-distance traveler of all.
THEN AGAIN, IF THAT BANANA didnât arrive in the Americas, if Polynesians were not roasting chickens along the western edge of South America, then the progression of bananas from many in Asia to a good number in the Pacific to a few in Africa only continued to the Americas with the advent of the modern world.
Either way, in 2016 the banana associated with European husbandry will celebrate its five hundredth birthday in our hemisphere. If the from-the-Pacific theory is discounted, those bananas, the ancestors of our plantains, were brought to the Americas by just a single person. Once they arrived, the fruit moved with a velocity that would become a hallmark of the expansion of the New World. It took just decades for the starchy staple to extend across a continent.
âOne hears on all sides that this special kind [of fruit] was brought from the Island of the Gran Canaria in the year 1516 by the Reverend Father Friar Tomás de Berlanga of the Order of Predicadores, to this city of Santo Domingo, whence they spread to the other settlements of this Island and to all the islands peopled by Christians. And they have been carried to the mainland, and in every port they flourished,â wrote Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, royal historian to the Spanish court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in his 1526 Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias (Santo Domingo is today the Dominican Republic). The fruit didnât become an African-like staple in Latin America, but it came fairly close and remains so today: A serving of cooked green banana is an essential part of any meal in most of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
Nurtured by farmers, and carried by sailors, merchants, conquerors, and pioneers, the banana took seven thousand years to complete its circle around the globe. By the time the United States was
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