How
did an infertile fruit get to Africa so soon?
BANANAS
were being grown in West Africa 2500 years ago – at least
1000 years before the accepted start of banana farming on the
continent. The finding raises questions about how a plant from
Asia reached what is now Cameroon so long ago.
The
evidence comes from microscopic silica fossils called phytoliths.
“They’re mineral inclusions in plant tissue,”
explains Hans Beeckman of the Royal Museum for Central Africa
in Tervuren, Belgium.
No
one knows their function, but the size and shape of each phytolith
reveals which plant it came from. Beeckman and colleagues from
Belgium and Cameroon found conical phytoliths in ancient rubbish
pits in Cameroon and compared them with phytoliths from plants
native to the region. They drew a blank at first, but eventually
concluded they must have come from the cultivated banana, having
ruled out an inedible indigenous relative called the red Abyssinian
banana.
“We
were surprised because we thought bananas were not grown in
Cameroon during that era,” says Beeckman’s colleague
Luc Vrydaghs. Cultivated bananas can only be grown from cutting
s rather than seeds, so humans must have brought them to Africa
from Asia, where they originated.
The
big question is who brought them, and how? “ [They] probably
came for Indonesia and Asia by sea to Madagascar, then though
eastern Africa and finally to Cameroon”, says Beeckman.
“But we’ve done the botanical part, and anthropologists
can now take in on,” he says. One way to trace the banana
trail might be to study old African languages and map the positions
of ancient tribes with words for the banana.
Nicholas
David, professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary
in Alberta, is mystified by the finding. He thinks bananas were
not known even in East Africa until the 10th century AD. He
adds that it’s possible bananas were brought by Indonesians
who settle in Madagascar in the first century AD, introducing
technology such as sewn boats and xylophones to Africa’s
ease coast. “But they would be too late to get them to
Cameroon by 500 BC.”
Andy
Coghlan
25 August 2001 New Scientist www.newscientist.com
