The bottle gourd may have floated to the Americas on its own
People were growing an African gourd in the Americas more than 8,000 years ago, long before any known ocean crossing. One theory said ice-age hunters carried it from Asia. A 2014 genetic study pointed another way: the American gourds are closest to wild African ones and could have drifted across the Atlantic, seeds sealed inside.
The calabash, or bottle gourd, is a fast-growing vine of the cucumber family, native to tropical Africa. Its fruits range from huge globes to slim serpentine shapes more than a metre long, and one grown in Kentucky in 2001 weighed 111.5 kilograms. Eaten young, it is a vegetable; dried when mature, it becomes a bowl, ladle, bottle or musical instrument. It was among the first plants people cultivated mainly for use as containers rather than food.
Its history is puzzling. Remains from China and Japan date back about 8,000 to 9,000 years, while Africa's earliest find is a gourd from a 12th Dynasty tomb at Thebes, about 4,000 years old. Genetic and archaeological evidence together suggest Asian farmers tamed it first, and African farmers did so independently over 4,000 years afterwards. A 2005 study linking American gourds to Asian strains supported the idea that Paleo-Indians carried them in, but the 2014 analysis of plastid genomes overturned it. Wild stands found in Zimbabwe in 2004 bear thin-walled fruit, suggesting that the tough, waterproof shell was bred in over millennia.
It is easy to grow. Stems can reach 9 metres in a summer and cover thatched roofs, the white flowers open at night and seem to rely on a nocturnal pollinator, probably a moth, and a single plant can produce a fruit a day for 45 days. Cooked, it is 95 percent water. Japanese cooks dry it into strips called kanpyō for rolled sushi, Koreans eat the flesh and turn the shell into bowls, and north India's lauki chana pairs it with split chickpeas.
There is one hazard. Like its relatives, the gourd contains bitter compounds called cucurbitacins that are toxic in high doses. Fruit that has been badly stored or allowed to overripen can become intensely bitter, and a few people have died after drinking such juice. The English name comes, through French and Spanish, from a pre-Roman Iberian word linked to the idea of a shell.
Source: Calabash
