Bottle Gourd Floated from Africa to Americas; Researchers Find

Bottle gourd drifted from Africa on ocean currents to reach the New World, new study suggests.

Bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) is cultivated all around the world and is used not only as a food source, but even as a tote bag, fishing floats and as a musical instrument. For long, it was thought that Asian settlers in the Americas brought the fruit with them. The problem with this idea was that the plant seed couldn't possibly survive the Arctic climate.

The new study from Pennsylvania State University shows that bottle gourd drifted from Africa, landed in Eastern Americas and thrived in the warm, humid climate long before Native Americans found ways to cultivate it around 10,000 years ago.

For the study researchers analyzed 86,000 base pairs from the DNA in the chloroplast of several varieties of bottle gourd. Chloroplasts are the sites of photosynthesis and are passed from females to the offspring. By looking at the genetic structure of these organelles, researchers were able to construct an evolutionary tree for the plant, according to National Geographic.

Their analysis showed that contrary to previous research, bottle gourds didn't come from Asia to America via the land bridge that connected the two continents. Since the bottle gourds found in the New World resembled those found in Africa, they could've floated to the country.

Researchers used computer models to find if the seeds of the plants could make this incredible journey.

Their study shows that the seeds could take a few months to reach the New World. The research also supports the idea that Native Americans could cultivate crops, according to Bruce Smith, from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and an author of the new study, USA Today reported.

Critics of the study have said that the authors failed to account for bottle gourds grown in Asia.

"I do now believe bottle gourds didn't come with Asian colonizers," Hanno Schaefer of Germany's Technical University of München told USA Today. "But I still think that what they have is not enough to tell us what happened."

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.