|
Wednesday August 22 4:10
PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - Bananas
were grown in West Africa 2,500 years ago, at least a millennium
before historians thought the fruit was first farmed there, new
research shows.
A team led by Hans Beeckman
of Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa discovered microscopic
banana fossils in Cameroon, the New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
They were dated back to around
500 BC.
The researchers ruled out indigenous
strains of the fruit and concluded people must have brought plants
from Asia, where they originated, and cultivated the fruit.
``They probably came from Indonesia
and Asia by sea to Madagascar, then through eastern Africa and finally
to Cameroon,'' Beeckman told the magazine.
Experts were mystified at the
findings. Nicholas David, professor of archaeology at the University
of Calgary in Canada, said he thought the yellow fruit had not even
reached East Africa until the 10th century
|
