Domestication of the Banana

The banana was domesticated in the New Guinea highlands, where archaeological evidence from the Kuk Swamp site shows cultivation and selective breeding of wild seeded bananas beginning between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest known instances of plant cultivation anywhere in the world and an independent origin of agriculture separate from the Fertile Crescent, China and the Americas. Selection for parthenocarpic, seedless fruit produced the edible banana varieties that later spread across Southeast Asia, South Asia and, carried by Arab and later European traders and colonizers, to Africa and the Americas, where the crop became both a staple food across much of the tropics and a major global export commodity.