The watermelon of the year ago was bitter and hard to swallow
Did the ancients like to eat watermelon with a bitter taste?
Watermelon is a green oval fruit depicted in ancient Egyptian murals, and people at that time loved its sweet taste. However, scientists have revealed that watermelons are not always sweet, but have been domesticated over a long period of time.
Before domestication, the flesh of wild varieties of watermelons was often bitter and even difficult to eat. As a result, researchers have been exploring which type of watermelon became the delicious watermelon it is today, and why the ancients began to cultivate and domesticate it.
Recently, a team of scientists found the answer when they looked at ancient watermelon seeds from 6,000 years ago. Although the watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) eaten today is only one of the genus Watermelon, it has some bitter relatives from further afield.
In the 50s of the last century, archaeologists began to excavate a site in Libya, and scientists found many plant seeds on the site, among which the oldest seeds of the genus Watermelon are more than 6,000 years old, and these Neolithic seeds are an important clue to reveal the ancestors of watermelons.
In addition, the researchers obtained another group of watermelon seeds from Sudan, which are about 3,300 years old. Although the seeds of different species of the genus Watermelon are almost identical in appearance, through genome sequencing, scientists can find a genetic relationship between them.
However, melon seeds thousands of years ago do not fully reveal the ancestors of modern domesticated watermelons, so the research team also found 47 watermelon samples from the herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens between 1824 and 2019, and collected the genomes of various species of the genus Watermelon that had been sequenced by previous people to find the relationship between old melons and new melons.
Through genome sequencing, "Miss Chenpu" reveals the mystery of a 6,000-year-old Libyan seed, which may have greenish-white flesh and bitterness. This is thanks to a gene called that has a V226F mutation in our red watermelon, but not in the ancient seeds.
Another bitterness regulator gene also allows us to speculate about the bitterness of the flesh. However, in Sudanese seeds 3,300 years ago, the DN** segments of these two genes were not found, so it is impossible to judge their sweetness and color.
In order to understand how ancient seeds are related to modern watermelons, and why humans domesticated watermelons, scientists need to look for more clues from the genome. Despite its bitter taste, the genome of sticky seed watermelon is similar to that of Libyan seeds, and it is mainly used as an ingredient in snacks or stews.
In addition, researchers found traces similar to modern watermelon seeds in a Neolithic human settlement, suggesting that ancient people may have also consumed bitter watermelon seeds.
New copywriting: A study found that humans had the habit of eating melon seeds as early as 6,000 years ago. At that time, people lived a hunter-gatherer life, and at the end of the day, they might sit around and eat melon seeds while chatting.
This may explain why watermelons in ancient times had a bitter taste, because people would not have spent time and energy collecting and cultivating bitter watermelons if they were just to eat them.
Scientists have also found that the genome of the seeds found in Libya contains genes from some subspecies of modern watermelon and the Amaru watermelon from South Africa, implying that there is genetic exchange between Libyan seeds and modern domesticated watermelons.
This suggests that Libyan seeds may have been domesticated by humans, and although the flesh may not be tasty, they are already human-modified seeds. This discovery surprised scientists and shed new light on the development of ancient agriculture.