First peppers picked over 6,000 years ago: Canadian researchers

Credit for taming the wild chili pepper belongs not to the ancestors of the mighty Inca or the advanced Maya civilizations, but to people living in the tropical lowlands, according to Canadian researchers.

Three University of Calgary researchers and a team of colleagues from the United States and Venezuela have traced the earliest known evidence of domestication of the spicy pepper to seven sites, the oldest dating back 6,100 years.

"Until quite recently it's been assumed that the ancestors of the great highland civilizations, like the Inca and the Aztecs, were responsible for most of the cultural and agricultural advances of the region," said University of Calgary archaeologist Scott Raymond, one of the authors of a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.

"We now have evidence that the indigenous people from tropical, lowland areas deserve credit for the domestication of the chili pepper."

Archeologists tend to make more discoveries in dry, arid areas like the highlands of the Andes than in tropical regions because artifacts tend to be better preserved. Foodstuffs in particular are hard to trace.

But the researchers discovered the chili pepper left starch microfossils on grinding stones and sediments of charred ceramic cookware.

The oldest domesticated chili starch grains were recovered from a village site in western Ecuador.

The plant, which belongs to the genus Capsicum, originally grew wild in what is now Bolivia. Domesticated versions of it spread throughout the region, from the Bahamas to southern Peru. With the European conquest of the Americas, the spice spread around the world.