[Aztlan] Yoo-Hoo's earliest ancestor

[Diehl, Richard]

Hola Justin and Listeros,

The history of the domestication of Theobroma sp. is intriguing and very poorly known. For a long time botanists believed it originally was domesticated in the northwestern Amazon basin but a recent essay by Nisao Ogata, Arturo Gómez Pompa and Karl Taube reopen the issue of possible Mesoamerican domestication from a wild native variety. See their "The Domestication and Distribution of Theobroma cacao L." in the book Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao, edited by Cameron L. McNeill, University of Florida Press, 2006. New genetic studies by Ogata (a really sharp young Mexican ethno-botanist at the Universidad Veracruzana who has spent a lot of time in the Amazon studying wild cacao) do not seem to resolve the issue one way or another. Possible representations of cacao in early Peruvian coastal art and archaeology suggest a domesticate there but according to the authors "Although our data support Mesoamerica as a center of cacao domestication, our research also suggests that some areas in South America could have been separate centers of domestication as well."(Page 69).

 Last spring in my Peoples of Latin America course we delved into Amazonian ethnography and ethno-botany in some depth and I was amazed to learn how widely cacao is used in the region. In any case, much remains to be learned about this fascinating plant.

Dick