The shared history of humans and grapes goes back thousands of years, but we are only now beginning to learn about the prehistory of grapes based on fossils from ancient times.
According to a paper published in the journal Nature on Monday, based on seeds found in Colombia, Panama and Peru, the plant invaded the Western Hemisphere between 19 and 60 million years ago. The oldest known grape seeds, found in India, date back 66 million years, the same age as the Chicxulub event.
Chicxulub is the second largest impact crater on Earth, located near the Yucatan Peninsula, which extends into the Gulf of Mexico to the south. The crater, 20 kilometers deep and 200 kilometers in diameter, was created by the impact of an asteroid about ten kilometers long. This caused a tsunami that swept across the entire planet and wiped out 76% of species, including dinosaurs that did not swim or fly.
We always think of the dinosaurs because they were the ones that were most affected, but the extinction event also had a huge impact on plants. The forest was completely rearranged, and the composition of the plants changed.
“These are the oldest vines we’ve ever found in this part of the world,” said Fabiani Herrera, a paleobotanist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. “They’re a few million years younger than the oldest ones on the other side of the world. This is important because it shows that grapes were already beginning to spread on Earth after the dinosaurs went extinct.”
It could land in my garden somewhere.
However, the spread required not only a rearrangement of the forest composition, but also the disappearance of the lizards destroyed by bulldozers. The large animals moving in large numbers change their environment, that is, by cutting down trees they make the forests more open, making the life of plants attached to trees very difficult. However, after their disappearance, denser forests were created, in which the climbing ability of vines became prominent, while birds and mammals that ate the berries began to spread the seeds.
Named Lithouva susmanii after Field Museum of Natural History paleobotanist Arthur T. Sussman, the South American grape is essentially a relative of modern grapes, with different species also living wild in Central and South America before becoming completely extinct for unknown reasons.
Herrera, who believes that extinction events behind the invasion of other plants can also be discovered, wants to explore the history of sunflowers, orchids and pineapples in addition to grapes.
The latest genetic survey, published in 2023, identified 2,503 types of table and wine grapes, as well as 1,022 types of wild grapes. The vines that grew around the Mediterranean split in two during the Ice Age 200,000 years ago, at which time the group that grows in Spain, Portugal and France today became isolated from the vines that grow in the region that extends across Turkey, Syria, Georgia and Israel. About 11,000 years ago, people began to grow the cultivated grapes of western Asia and the Caucasus, even for direct consumption, rather than to make wine. Farmers here took their grapes with them as they moved west and crossed them with western wild varieties.
(CNN, IFL Science, ZME Sciences)
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