By IANS
New York : New research into the history of the potato has rubbished two popular theories about how they travelled from their homeland in South America to Europe – and then to the rest of the world.
The study, by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used DNA to conclude that a whopping 99 percent of all modern potatoes are descendents of varieties once grown in south-central Chile.
But it raised doubts over the popular belief that Chilean potatoes travelled to Europe only after their Andean predecessors were wiped out during the ‘great potato famine’, the 19th-century epidemic that devastated potato fields across the continent.
Findings of the study have been published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Botany.
Scientists have for long debated the origins of the potato, with some maintaining that Chilean potatoes were the first to come to Europe.
Others say European potatoes were originally descended from plants grown high in the Andes mountains between eastern Venezuela and northern Argentina.
This theory holds that Andean potatoes were wiped out during the potato famine, leading to the import of Chilean varieties to re-establish the crop.
The new research, however, contends both theories are suspect as Chilean and Andean potatoes were grown in Europe decades before and after the famine.
“Basically, we found that the Andean potatoes got to Europe first, around 1700. However, Chilean potatoes were starting to get popular there 34 years before the late blight epidemic,” said Mercedes Ames, co-author of the study.
The study also found that Andean potatoes grew as late as 1892 in Europe, proving they weren’t polished off by the epidemic and grew along with Chilean potatoes – before the later became dominant.
“The problem with these two theories is that they rely on inferences based on the morphology of old plant samples, as well as inferences based on historical records about day-length adaptation, shipping routes, and the role of the late blight epidemic,” said David Spooner, co-author.
“Our work is the first direct evidence – as opposed to the inferential evidence used in prior studies – on the origin of the European potato because the herbarium specimens we used are like fossils.
“Because of Mercedes’s work, they’re going to have to rewrite the textbooks,” he said.