Trans am water drift1/4/2023 ![]() ![]() With no obvious explanation or mechanism for such a sweeping displacement of native varieties, however, this theory also warrants reconsideration.įig. Furthermore, to explain why only pre-Columbian gourds appeared genetically Asian, authors of the previous study ( 6) suggested that a continent-wide replacement of New World gourd lineages by introduced varieties took place following European arrival. Given this lack of supporting evidence, the small amount of genetic data used to confirm this mode of colonization into the Americas deserves additional scrutiny. In arctic regions, natural containers tend to be derived from animal products-hides, for example-rather than from plants (e.g., ref. Second, no archaeological or ethnographic evidence is known that supports the use of bottle gourds by humans in either Siberia or Alaska. Based on the physiological requirements of diverse modern cultivars ( 15), the growing season in Late Pleistocene Beringia would simply have been too cold and too short for bottle gourds to propagate and survive. First, bottle gourds thrive in tropical and subtropical habitats. Two factors suggest that bottle gourd colonization of the Americas via the Bering Land Bridge is unlikely, however. These wild populations were domesticated in several distinct New World locales, most likely near established centers of food crop domestication. Once they arrived in the New World, naturalized gourd populations likely became established in the Neotropics via dispersal by megafaunal mammals. Ocean-current drift modeling shows that wild African gourds could have simply floated across the Atlantic during the Late Pleistocene. In contrast to the earlier results, we find that all pre-Columbian bottle gourds are most closely related to African gourds, not Asian gourds. Here, we isolate 86,000 base pairs of plastid DNA from a geographically broad sample of archaeological and living bottle gourds. However, this scenario requires the propagation of tropical-adapted bottle gourds across the Arctic. A previous study using ancient DNA concluded that Paleoindians transported already domesticated gourds to the Americas from Asia when colonizing the New World. Despite its utilitarian importance to diverse human populations, it remains unresolved how the bottle gourd came to be so widely distributed, and in particular how and when it arrived in the New World. Although native to Africa, bottle gourd was in use by humans in east Asia, possibly as early as 11,000 y ago (BP) and in the Americas by 10,000 BP. Bottle gourd ( Lagenaria siceraria) was one of the first domesticated plants, and the only one with a global distribution during pre-Columbian times. ![]()
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