Scientists have figured out where did apples

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Ученые выяснили, откуда появились яблокиSpread apples on the Ground helped silk road.

Scientists have stated that the homeland of all apples is Kazakhstan or the mountainous areas of China, where the apples then spread throughout the world via the silk road.

According to the researchers, Apple was domesticated approximately four thousand years ago. In accordance with ancient Greek Chronicles, these fruits have been domesticated by Alexander the great, who took with them from Sogdiana, the most Northern and the Eastern provinces of the Persian Empire, the first seedlings of dwarf Apple trees.

In turn, modern genetic and species analysis points to two possible ancestral homeland of apples, Turkey, where today grow many wild relatives of Apple trees and where there is maximum species diversity, and Central Asia, where it grows a direct ancestor of modern cultivars of these plants, Malus sieversii.

Now, researchers have studied the DNA of several varieties of modern apples and found that their homeland is the South-East of Kazakhstan and North-West China. Comparing sets of small mutations in the genes of the Apple and in the DNA of their putative wild relatives, scientists were able to “recover” the genome of the common ancestor of all these fruit varieties and to understand that he was more like an Apple Sievers from the foothills of Tien Shan than on the Turkish Apple-“dimashki” with extremely sour, small and astringent fruit.

A key factor in the evolution of these plants in the West and the East, as shown by genetic analysis, were the silk road, along which they extended together with merchants and travelers. They ate the first wild and cultivated varieties of apples, and “planted” their seed roadsides of the time, helping Apple to interbreed with the local subspecies of Malus sylvestris and Malus sieversii and to acquire new properties.

Due to this, most of the European varieties of apples has quite a sour taste, because their genome contains more inclusions DNA “Turkish” Malus sylvestris than “Chinese” Malus sieversii, and Asian varieties, on the contrary, are sweet because of the lack of such additions.

Previously, scientists have declared that have found evidence of the most ancient in the history of the battle. According to Reuters, the battle took place about 10 thousand years ago in the region Naturak 30 kilometres West of lake Turkana in Northern Kenya.

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