Karolina Grabowska / PexelsThe evolutionary history of chili peppers dates back at least 35 million yearsKarolina Grabowska / Pexels
South America is no longer believed to be the birthplace of peppers of the genus Capsicum, which includes more than 30 species. Botanists at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA, identified chili pepper fossils that date the spicy plants as at least 50 million years old. Chili peppers are part of the Solanaceae family, which also includes bell peppers, tomatoes, and deadly nightshade. It was previously believed that these plants emerged in the rainforests of South America 15 million years ago, before spreading to other continents. Two researchers at the university’s Museum of Natural History stumbled upon a typical Solanaceae feature embedded in a fossil: tiny spines at the end of a fruit stem. Two other fossils from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science supported the hypothesis that chili peppers are much older than previously thought and already existed in North America. The fossils were from the Eocene geological epoch (34 million to 56 million years ago). A nightshade fossil found in Colombia was from a similar time period, indicating that this family of plants was distributed across the Americas as far back as 50 million years ago. The Solanaceae family comprises about 3,000 species and 100 genera, including chili peppers (New Phytologist, March 23; NSF, May 22).
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