Avocado cultivation’s ancient origins hold lessons for a changing climate

The researchers’ results show that people in Central America were already tending wild avocados as much as 11,000 years ago and, added Kennett, that people were intentionally selecting for larger and more robust avocados by 7,500 years ago.

“Plant cultivation and domestication underpins the formation of agricultural systems, the global expansion of human populations and ultimately the formation of larger cities and nation-states,” he said. “While we have gained a lot of knowledge about the significance of cereal grains like wheat, rice and corn historically, we now know that more than 2,000 economically important plants were domesticated worldwide over the past 12,000 years, including the avocado.”

Using a sequence of well-dated desiccated and carbonized avocado remains from El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras, first author VanDerwarker and Kennett defined an early, previously unknown locus of the fruit’s domestication. They also made an unexpected discovery: avocados were being farmed there even before maize.

“El Gigante residents had already domesticated avocados by the time maize arrived in the region,” VanDerwarker, director of UCSB’s Integrative Subsistence Lab, said of the study’s “biggest surprise.” “This completely alters our understanding of Mesoamerican agriculture — traditionally seen as maize transforming foragers into farmers upon its arrival to a new location. But our case study shows that ancient Hondurans were already farmers as they were fully engaged in tree cultivation upon maize’s arrival.”