A chili pepper is seen in this Hamilton Spectator file photo. Archaeologists trace food origins not just from curiosity about the ancients' everyday lives. How a crop spreads sheds light on prehistoric travel and trade. In the Middle East, figs were domesticated 11,400 years ago. Wheat wasn't far behind. In the New World, corn was being cultivated around 9,000 years ago. This study shows that chili peppers are among the oldest domesticated foods in the Western Hemisphere, being cultivated, traded and transported 6,100 years ago.

Peppers spicing up meals for 6,100 years
Turkish Daily News Turkey February 17, 2007

Although a member of the deadly nightshade family, chili peppers are used worldwide to spice up meals and for medicinal purposes and the variety of chilies found around the world are as varied as their tastes and fieriness. Possessing high amounts of vitamin C as well as powerful anti-bacterial properties, eating chili [peppers] has been proven to be beneficial for gastrointestinal and general health. Add a hot new discovery to the cooking pot: archaeologists have traced what they believe is evidence of the first home-grown chili peppers, used in South America 6,100 years ago. ... Alternate modern scientific evidence has proven that the physical pain caused by chilies stimulates the brain to produce endorphins, which subsequently produce a sense of well being. Chilies are also extremely rich in vitamin C and work as anti-bacterials and anti-fungals when combined with other herbs.

Ancient cooks liked it hot
AP/CP/Reuters/Toronto Star USA/Canada/UK February 19, 2007

WASHINGTON – Who says food fads can't last? Thousands of years before the advent of Tex-Mex, ancient Americans were spicing up stew with red hot chili peppers. New fossil evidence shows prehistoric people from southern Peru up to the Bahamas were cultivating varieties of chilies millennia before Columbus's arrival brought the spice to world cuisine. The earliest traces so far are from southwestern Ecuador, where families fired up meals with homegrown peppers about 6,100 years ago. The discovery, reported today in the journal Science, suggests early New World agriculture was more sophisticated than once thought. "Some people who have described ancient food ways as being simple will probably have to rethink their ideas because of this work," said lead researcher Linda Perry of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. ... The pepper species cultivated in the villages – the earliest known settlements in the Western Hemisphere – grew naturally only to the east of the Andes. That means that the people in the villages of the tropical region transported them across the mountains to grow them, Raymond said. Results from the Canadian-U.S.-Venezuelan project yielded evidence that peppers were farmed in the region more than 1,000 years before the plants were cultivated in Peru or Mexico, [Scott Raymond, a University of Calgary archaeologist] said. ...

US: Study shows first peck of peppers picked 6,100 years ago
Fresh Plaza Netherlands February 19, 2007

Here's a hot, new discovery: archaeologists have traced what they believe is evidence of the first home-grown chili peppers, used in South America 6,100 years ago. And it was people in tropical, lowland areas of what is now western Ecuador who first spiced up their cuisine, not those from higher, drier Mexico and Peru as was previously assumed, said Scott Raymond, a University of Calgary archaeologist. ...

A barley field. Photo: Doug Wilson / USDA. " ... the origins of agriculture "are far more complex than the simplistic view of a single event. ...cultures came to a dead end, and with them their crops."

Related: Double cropping the earliest agriculture
Michael Balter ScienceNOW Daily News February 13, 2007

A new study suggests that barley may have undergone domestication twice, a finding with important implications for understanding the spread of farming. Archaeologists have long debated whether the so-called founder crops of the agricultural revolution--including wheat and barley--were domesticated once or multiple times. The record is ambiguous. Over the past decades, they have unearthed the earliest remains of domesticated barley at sites in the Fertile Crescent that date back 10,500 years. But there is also evidence for barley cultivation about 9000 years ago at sites further east in Central Asia. Today, the wild progenitors of domesticated wheat and other founder crops grow only in the Fertile Crescent, but wild barley is found in the western and eastern regions. As a result, archaeologists haven't been sure whether the cultivated barley in the east came from the Fertile Crescent or was domesticated directly from local wild plants. ... Archaeobotanist George Willcox of the National Center for Scientific Research in Lyons, France, says that the paper demonstrates that the origins of agriculture "are far more complex than the simplistic view of a single event." Willcox adds that there might have been more than two domestications of barley and other crops, but that the evidence for them has been lost: "Archaeology tells us that sites were abandoned, cultures came to a dead end, and with them their crops."