Curious Cook

Chilli pungency: Tracking it back

In a second study of chilli pungency in the wild, Tewksbury, Levey, and colleagues summarize current views of the evolution of Capsicum species, and report on several years of surveying chilli populations in the semiarid countryside of southeastern Bolivia, the region where their spiciness may have originated. They found mixed populations of pungent and non-pungent plants, and pungency seems to be associated with higher elevations and possibly greater stress.

Chilli pungency: A selective chemical weapon

The paper on chilli archaeology that I described a couple of days ago included two recent references that caught my eye, both by Joshua J. Tewksbury at the University of Washington, Douglas J. Levey of the University of Florida, and various colleagues. They add to our understanding of why it is that chillis evolved to accumulate the chemical, capsaicin, that makes their fruits pungent.

Ancient chillis

Spices and herbs are stimulants. Not necessarily pharmacological, but sensory: they stimulate our senses of taste and smell in foods that are otherwise bland. The human diet must have gotten a little boring when our ancestors first learned to cultivate grains and root crops and began to lean heavily on these starchy staffs of life, after millions of years of eating this and that as hunter-gatherers. So when did humans start spicing up their monotonous new diet? Very early--in the Americas, even before the widespread use of cooking pots, according to a new report on the archaeology of the chilli "pepper." A  group of fifteen scientists led by Linda Perry of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History published their results in this week's Science.