Fossilized Peach Pits Were Discovered in China

According to Live Science, a team of researchers detailed fossilized peach cores discovered in China’s Yunnan province at a construction site. Su discovered the fossilized peaches in Kunming in southwest China when some road construction exposed a rock outcrop from the late Pliocene era.

Like today’s peach pits, the prehistoric pits have an oval shape and deep grooves cut through the fossilized pit.

‘If you imagine the smallest commercial peach today, that’s what these would look like, ‘ Wilf said. According to Su, the fossils were found in strata.

If we go by the records, the earliest existence and use of peaches date back 8,000 years and the lack of information on existence of wild peaches and fruit’s long trade history hasn’t allowed scientists to establish the origins of peaches.

The discovery provides important new evidence of the origins and evolution of the modern fruit.

Peter Wilf, a professor of paleobotany at Penn State and an author of the study reported in Scientific Reports, said, “The peach is an important part of human history, and it’s important to understand how it became what it is today”. The duo carried out several tests confirming that the fossilized peaches are indeed more than 2.5 million years old and not from recent contamination. The pits were discovered back in 2010 and they were subjected to carbon dating processes which measure the amount of decay which carbon-14 was subjected to. But their results showed that the fossils were beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, which is now about 50,000 years.

Long before Kramer exalted the virtues of the Mackinaw, ancient peach trees offered up their fruits to the animals of ancient China.

The oldest evidence had been found within archaeological records dating back roughly 8,000 years, but no wild population has ever been found.

It turns out that peaches may have been a popular snack even before the arrival of modern humans. The earliest peach eaters might have even helped the plant species spread by inadvertently dispersing seeds through their feces, the researchers said.

The peach was already there when the first humans arrived in China. “It was there before humans, and through history, we adapted to it and it to us”.

At first the scientists were skeptical that the peach pits were so old. And these fossilized pits are surprisingly similar to modern peach pits.

In China, Su says the peach is a culturally important symbol and can represent immortality, beauty, and good fortune.

Life was peachy before humans walked the earth-at least in China.

After finding the fossils, Su brought them to Penn State.

These fossils reveal the existence of peaches 2 and a half million years ago, in a time before modern humans and Homo erectus. They hope to be able to remake the evolution of this fruit based only on the pits they found, but not having the whole-plant will definitely by a challenge. The only difference in the ancient and modern peaches is the size, which the ancient peaches were barely 2 inches in diameter.