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Ancient Peruvians loved their spuds


The humble chip originated from potatoes grown in Peru about 7000 years ago (Image: iStockphoto)


The genetic study shows the first potato known to have been farmed is genetically closest to a species now found only in southern Peru, the US and UK researchers write online, ahead of print, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This result shows the potato originated one time and from a species that was distributed in southern Peru," says Professor David Spooner, a US Department of Agriculture researcher at the University of Wisconsin, who led the study.

The findings challenge theories that potatoes were first cultivated in Bolivia or Argentina, or that farmers bred them several different times in several different places.

"The origin of crop plants has long fascinated botanists, archaeologists, and sociologists with the following fundamental questions: when, where, how, why, and how many times did crop domestication occur? What are the wild progenitors of these crops?" the researchers write.

The study did not address when the first potato would have been cultivated, but other research suggests it would have been between 7000 and 10,000 years ago.

A single species

Potatoes are a major food staple around the world and mostly belong to a single species Solanum tuberosum.

Baking potatoes, red potatoes, golden potatoes and other favourites all originated in southern Chile, neighbouring Peru, Spooner says.

The Chilean potato that gave rise to modern potatoes is probably a hybrid of the ancestral Peruvian potato and a wild species found in Bolivia and Argentina, Spooner says.

But in South America, many other cultivated potatoes are eaten.

"There are many different colours: solid and mottled and dotted from white to tan to purple to red," Spooner says.

Fossil potatoes dating back 7000 years have been found.

Looking to genetics

For their study, Spooner and colleagues did genetic comparisons of 261 wild relatives of potatoes and 98 so-called landrace types, which are primitive cultivated crops grown by indigenous peoples.

The researchers believe their findings show a single species, S. bukasovii, gave rise to the first known cultivated potato.

But it would not have closely resembled the big, pale fleshy tubers that people crave today, Spooner says.

"The wild species, many of them have tubers, the potato part you eat, that is tiny, sometimes the size of a pea," he says.

"Oftentimes they are mildly poisonous."

Tags: environment, agricultural-crops, archaeology, cloning-and-dna