A Quick Question About My "Tomato History" Image

[Petronius_II]

I'd like to write something about tomatoes for the Davesgarden.com contest while there's still time; deadline is tomorrow.

Awhile back, for another thread, I created the following image, which I've titled "Tomato History Q&D":



I'd like to use this image in my writing, but I'm not confident it's as true to tomato history as I want it to be. I'm sure the basic concept of the image is a good one, but I'm not so sure I've placed the "pink zone," for cultivated tomatoes, and the "red zone," for the original wild tomatoes of the Andes, as accurately as I want.

Here's how I imagine the Central American rain forest: not as hot as you might expect because the overhead canopy of tree leaves provides filtered sunlight and quite a bit of shade.

Not as wet as you might expect, because after the tree leaves take their share of the rain, all the other plant species on the forest floor are competing for the same water. Tomatoes (and some varieties of pepper) evolved to sprawl all over horizontally, in large part because that was an effective strategy for choking out the competition.

I conclude that the farther away you are from "South Central" on the chart, the more special considerations come into play when choosing varieties, and deciding how to grow them. (Paradoxically, the Italians, who have something very close to a perfect climate for tomato growing, have produced heirloom varieties that often don't have enough of the kind of disease resistance American gardeners need. Seed savers can benefit greatly from practicing "survival of the fittest" seed saving of these types.)

But perhaps the "pink zone" should be a little farther to north or south, east or west? I'm not at all sure about that. Informed opinions very much wanted here.

EDITED TO ADD: I think I should replace the word "Yucatan" in the image with "Central American." Yucatan is probably overly specific.

[carolyn137]

Just a few comments.

The wild species originated in the high plateau areas primarily in Chile and Peru and new species are being found all the time. I think it's now up to 16 wild species. In those high plateaus the weather is temperate and the species are perennials.

No one knows how some of those wild species got to Mexico, just theoretical musings, and where they started evolving and enlarging and there's quite a bit of research on that primarily done by Dr. Ester Van der Knapp and her colleagues at Ohio State U. They've been studying the genes that allow for upsizing as well as retraction of the style as part of the conversion to what's called a cerasiforme, same as Matt's Wild and many others which are partially evolved cherry tomatoes where the style is retracted.

No one knows where in Mexico they first were seen, but I doubt it would be specifically in the Yucatan in a jungle region since they probably grew better in areas more like where they came from.

There's a fairly good discussion of tomato history on the book written by Andrew F Smith and Andy has done his research well. In addition there are several other online sources on tomato history, not all of them accurate, though, and very general in nature.

In geneneral, the conversion of certain wild species on their way to more evolved fruit forms and colors is considered by most to be an enigma wrapped in a mystery.

I know about the writing contest at DG, but I won't be entering that contest.

[Petronius_II]

Thanks very much for your reply.

For this contest, I think I'm going to stick to corn, and maybe another topic or two, and let any writing about tomatoes wait for some other time.

The Spanish under Cortez and his successors would have gotten most of their early tomatoes from the regions between Veracruz and Mexico City, which I assume is hotter and a bit drier than the rain forest floor, though we must also assume the natives were experts at irrigation, so I'm not so sure about the latter.

My best educated guess is, the "conquistadors' tomatoes" were mostly round or slightly oblate; yellow, orange, and red-orange; and large-cherry-to-midsize, and hadn't changed much at all from the rain forest tomatoes. EDITED TO ADD: Quite a few of them may have carried the genes to produce big beefsteaks, but with pollination being shut down in the hottest parts of the year, the natives wouldn't often have seen that expressed in the phenotype, and wouldn't have done much selecting for size.

I do still think, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, that the initial transformation from Andean wild varieties to the tomato as we know it, happened in the rain forests. I'd imagine the Mayans, Zapotecs, and some others had something to do with it. I could of course be completely wrong about all that. I do wish I had easy access to all the literature you've read, Carolyn.

[carolyn137]

=Petronius_II;257909]Thanks very much for your reply.

For this contest, I think I'm going to stick to corn, and maybe another topic or two, and let any writing about tomatoes wait for some other time.

****

Sounds like a plan to me. Why don't you do teosenti and the evolvement of corns and/or the Ethiopian wheat landrace story and you can also maybe work in the rice landrace story as well.

(The Spanish under Cortez and his successors would have gotten most of their early tomatoes from the regions between Veracruz and Mexico City, which I assume is hotter and a bit drier than the rain forest floor, though we must also assume the natives were experts at irrigation, so I'm not so sure about the latter.)

I've been to many places in Mexico and yes the area around Mexico City is very arid. But the natives did grow tomatoes as a crop, the tomatoes grew wild.

(My best educated guess is, the "conquistadors' tomatoes" were mostly round or slightly oblate; yellow, orange, and red-orange; and large-cherry-to-midsize, and hadn't changed much at all from the rain forest tomatoes. EDITED TO ADD: Quite a few of them may have carried the genes to produce big beefsteaks, but with pollination being shut down in the hottest parts of the year, the natives wouldn't often have seen that expressed in the phenotype, and wouldn't have done much selecting for size.)

What the Spanish too back to Spain and also to the places on their trading routes in the Caribeean, Phillipines and beyond were very similar to what we still see today along the Gulf Coast down into FL, and that's primarily small fruited ones, some currant varieties, some cerasiformes, and initially also yellow but the mutation from yellow to red is a common one. THe ones that Riived in Spain were yellow and it was only later that some red ones reached Italy from Spain.

I don't think any of them at that point in history carried any genes for beefsteak size tomatoes as the research of Dr. Van derKnapp and others have shown. What does happen and probably did happen is that mutations are happening all the time and there were no beefsteak sized tomatoes until way into the early 1800's.

(I do still think, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, that the initial transformation from Andean wild varieties to the tomato as we know it, happened in the rain forests. I'd imagine the Mayans, Zapotecs, and some others had something to do with it. I could of course be completely wrong about all that. I do wish I had easy access to all the literature you've read, Carolyn.)

The only confirmation we have of tomatoes being in Central America is from Mexico as documented by the Spanish. If we knew HOW the tomatoes got from the Andean plateaus toMexico it might help, meaning bird droppings, wind and rain, whatever, it would make the situation clearer. Since many think that tomatoes got to the Galapagos ISlands from Peru via bird transmission, that 's something to think about as well.

[Petronius_II]

Thanks again, Carolyn. Your last post is a lot to chew on; this is the paragraph that interests me most:

The only confirmation we have of tomatoes being in Central America is from Mexico as documented by the Spanish. If we knew HOW the tomatoes got from the Andean plateaus toMexico it might help, meaning bird droppings, wind and rain, whatever, it would make the situation clearer. Since many think that tomatoes got to the Galapagos Islands from Peru via bird transmission, that 's something to think about as well.

As an anthropologist/historian/ethnobotanist, I'm strictly amateur. The closest I've come to "professionalism" vis-a-vis this thread came a couple of years ago, when I had an antiquities expert who specializes in Pre-Columbian artifacts check out my entire Pre-Columbian collection, prior to selling all the verified items on Ebay. (I still have a purported Teotihuacan incensario, but he didn't verify it, and I do suppose it may be a fake.) The point being, I put a lot of care into my Ebay writing, which led me also to a crash course in Pre-Col anthropology, i.e. a furious round of internet research, and a sense of pre-conquest history that is, at best, a rather sketchy outline.

I feel confident in stating it was either the Olmecs, or some of their subjects, who perfected corn/maize as we know it, thus making the Olmecs fabulously wealthy for a few centuries. Tomatoes I'm not as confident about. "Tomatl" is a word from the Aztec language, but that doesn't really tell us much. Like the equally unprepared Incas, the Aztecs had only been a thriving society for a bit over 100 years when the Europeans began arriving.

I think it's not just a case of "the only confirmation we have of tomatoes being in Central America is from Mexico as documented by the Spanish." That's probably the only kind of confirmation we could have, until much more and better archaeological work is done in the seven countries south of Mexico.

For Costa Rica, as one example, we know just enough to point to a Southern Mayan artifact and say, "that is Mayan." If it isn't Mayan, well, we don't really know much about what the indigenous Costa Rican tribes called themselves, or were called by others, or much about what they were up to in the several hundred years between the fall of the Mayan city-states, and the era of the Aztecs. We can be pretty sure the Aztecs traded with natives of the seven modern nation-states, probably pretty extensively, but I personally know almost nothing of the details.

Vis-a-vis the tomatoes question, here's one thing I see about plant migrations: there is an ecological barrier in the isthmus of Panama, a region about 50 miles in length where the Pan-American Freeway has never been built because it's just too swampy. Solid wetlands from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Wind-borne seeds could maybe pass through the zone, but if so, slowly and with great difficulty. Land animals other than humans, most likely not. Rain, I think not, because in wetlands, anything that floats isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

That leaves birds and humans, or some combination thereof, as the most likely candidates for transmitting the wild tomatoes from South America to Mexico.

I think humans had more to do with it than our current knowledge can prove or disprove. Rather than accepting suppositions such as "the Central Mexicans didn't cultivate tomatoes," or "the Incas didn't think much of the wild tomatoes, and never bothered cultivating it," I think of it as being more like, "the ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region didn't do much cultivating of the chenopods (Lamb's Quarters and its near relatives) that were a major staple of their diet before Mexican traders brought corn to what is now the USA. They didn't cultivate the chenopods much, because they just didn't need to. Chenopods grow almost anywhere. They can take care of themselves without any help. But yes, apparently sometimes they did cultivate chenopods. The archaeological work on proto-Anasazi pithouses seems to support that conclusion."

Could ancestors of our current tomatoes have been traded directly from South America to the Mexico City-Veracruz region? I have no idea. I think it unlikely, but:

Some cultural artifacts going back a very long time do appear at various times in all three regions: Central Mexico, the Central American states, and South America. Pyramids, for example.

If all that weren't confusing enough, recent DNA studies have shown that there was much more involved in populating the Americas than just the old Bering Strait theory can account for. Many of the ancestors of Pre-Columbian peoples no doubt did travel by way of the Bering Strait. But significant numbers, especially the farther south you go towards Peru etc., came from Polynesia/Micronesia/Melanesia, and believe it or not, some almost certainly came more or less directly from China.

[carolyn137]

A short answer.

I have no problem at all with the Olmecs, etc., selecting from Teosente ( don't have time to check the spelling), so if I were you I'd go with the evolvement that corn took along the way. And there's lots of good info on that.

Archaeology is one of my passions and I subscribe to four archaeology magazines and am very much up to date on the discussion and data surrounding the Bering Strait theory as opposed to others.

I'm also aware of the claims of some authors that the Chinese not only were first to mainland N America East Coast but also first on the West Coast, but I remain unconvinced.

[Petronius_II]

AFAIK the DNA studies don't say anything about "first," all they say is "people on a short ancestry path to mainland China appear to be one part of a much bigger picture."

"Kennewick Man," found in Washington State, is according to one scholar who's examined his DNA, more closely related to Polynesians, and the Ainu of Japan, than to modern Native Americans. Which is still controversial and yateda yateda.

I mentioned all that as part of a very generalized opinion, certainly not held by me alone, that there are some things about ancient South Americans in particular, that just don't seem to add up unless there was more involved than travel, mostly by land, through "Beringia." And we also know that the ancestors of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and New Zealand had to be pretty good at travelling wide stretches of ocean by boat, many centuries before anybody else on the planet proved they could do it-- except some of their South Pacific cousins, of course.

It's just part of the whole "ancient history and prehistory is a jigsaw puzzle with more pieces missing than present" thing. With which I'm sure you're familiar.

[Petronius_II]

...BTW, I let the Dave's Garden deadline go by without making an entry. Too much of my usual perfectionism about my writing was the main culprit, but I'm still kicking myself a bit over that.

[Tracydr]

Originally Posted by Petronius_II

Thanks very much for your reply.

For this contest, I think I'm going to stick to corn, and maybe another topic or two, and let any writing about tomatoes wait for some other time.

The Spanish under Cortez and his successors would have gotten most of their early tomatoes from the regions between Veracruz and Mexico City, which I assume is hotter and a bit drier than the rain forest floor, though we must also assume the natives were experts at irrigation, so I'm not so sure about the latter.

My best educated guess is, the "conquistadors' tomatoes" were mostly round or slightly oblate; yellow, orange, and red-orange; and large-cherry-to-midsize, and hadn't changed much at all from the rain forest tomatoes. EDITED TO ADD: Quite a few of them may have carried the genes to produce big beefsteaks, but with pollination being shut down in the hottest parts of the year, the natives wouldn't often have seen that expressed in the phenotype, and wouldn't have done much selecting for size.

I do still think, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, that the initial transformation from Andean wild varieties to the tomato as we know it, happened in the rain forests. I'd imagine the Mayans, Zapotecs, and some others had something to do with it. I could of course be completely wrong about all that. I do wish I had easy access to all the literature you've read, Carolyn.

Regions around Mexico City could be variable in temperature, since they are surrounded by high mountains. Similar to AZ, they have many zones in a small area. We have USDA zones from 6-9 in Az and I would guess Mexico City is similar, maybe more extreme, since I believe their mountains are higher.

[dice]

Birds are the obvious evolutionary vector of seeds. Swamps, mountain
ranges, deserts, nothing really stands in their way during seasonal
migrations. I had a tiny little tomato plant volunteer in some fill dirt
around a telephone pole out in the parking strip for an example of
what birds can do. (With no care at all, it produced one cherry tomato.)

There was an ancient seafaring people (I forget the name) that travelled
up and down the coasts of South America, but why would they carry
wild tomatoes the size of peas with them? (Someone's home remedy for
scurvy, maybe.)

An encyclopedia style summary of "Indigenous people of the Americas":
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/top...f_the_Americas

edit:
So those are two different colors? Perhaps a lighter pink would
make that less likely to be overlooked.