It’s hard to imagine the history that lies behind the cacao trees grown on agroforestry farms in the Amazon today. For a long time, people believed that cacao’s origins lay elsewhere. Archaeological evidence had pointed to what is today southern Mexico and Central America — Mesoamerica — as the birthplace of the domesticated form of the Theobroma cacao tree some 4,000 years ago. It was only believed to have arrived in South America later. “We would always find cacao trees in the native forest on the Upper Amazon [in Ecuador] and think of the peoples who had lived in the region thousands of years before, but at the time, we had no idea that cacao was native to the region,” says Francisco Valdez, an archaeologist at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). At the start of the 2000s, Valdez began studying evidence that would bring new knowledge about the ancient peoples who once prospered in the Upper Amazon. His research focused on the Andean region of the Amazon River Basin, straddling modern-day Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. Among numerous findings was the surprising detection of cacao DNA on ceramic artifacts dating back thousands of years that had been used inside homes and as burial items. This led to a reevaluation of the fruit’s origin: with South American roots, the evidence showed that cacao was already circulating between 19 different pre-Columbian cultures some 5,500 years ago. “The most important characteristic of our research is the fact that it…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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