Hot research news: Chili pepper is old

The study provides details about early plant cultivation in South America.
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Inhabitants of the New World had chili peppers and the makings of taco chips 6,100 years ago, according to new research that examined the bowl-scrapings of people sprinkled throughout Central America and the Amazon basin.
Upcoming questions on the research agenda -- and this is not a joke -- include: Did they have salsa? When did they get beer?
The findings described today in a 15-author report in the journal Science make chili pepper the oldest spice in use in the Americas, and one of the oldest in the world.
The researchers believe further study may show that the fiery pod was used 1,000 years earlier than their current oldest specimen, as it shows evidence of having been domesticated, a process that would have taken time. If so, that would put chili pepper in the same league (although probably not the same millennium) as hoarier spices such as coriander, capers and fenugreek.
Chili pepper, however, makes up for its junior status with rapid spread and wild popularity. Within decades of European contact, the New World plant was carried across Europe and into Africa and Asia, adopted widely, and further altered through selective breeding.
Today, chili pepper is an essential cooking ingredient in places as different as Hungary (where paprika is a national symbol) and China (where entire cuisines are built around its heat).
Other findings
In all seven New World sites where chili pepper residues were found, the researchers also detected remnants of corn. That suggests the domestication of the two foods -- still intimately paired in Latin American cuisine -- may have gone hand-in-hand.
However, the new study -- led by Linda Perry, of the Smithsonian Institution -- does more than illuminate the early history of cooking. It also provides details about early plant cultivation in South America, where agriculture emerged independent of its "discovery" in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia.
As for the beer, David John Goldstein, an anthropologist at Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago, said the New World's oldest dedicated brewery is at a 2,600-year-old site in southern Peru. There, people from the Wari empire made a drink called chicha from the sugary seeds of a local tree and drank it for ceremonial purposes.