Plantains and bananas

History and origin of bananas

These fruits are believed to be a crop originating in the region between India and Malaysia. The origins of the banana are certainly complex. Archaeologists have located it in the Kuk Valley in New Guinea around the year 8000 BCE being theoretically this date where the banana was first domesticated.

The reality suggests that while this fact is most probably true, the theory remains that bananas may have been domesticated spontaneously throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The Kuk valley is the first known place which does not mean that it really was the cradle of all the species that sprouted from this original banana.

From New Guinea it spread to the Philippines and then through the tropics. It is likely that plantain was grown in East Africa from 3000 BC. and in Madagascar in 1000 BC.

Buddhist literature speaks of the existence of banana when the expeditions of Alexander the Great took this to India in 327 BC.

From Indonesia they spread south and west to Hawaii and Polynesia in stages. Traders introduced the tree into Europe in the tenth century.

In the sixteenth century the Portuguese settlers would take it to South America from the plantations of West Africa. Another theory speaks to us of the own Spaniards being who introduced it in American lands in their trips to colonize the New World. There is one last theory that can not be ruled out by some historians, who tells us that bananas could have reached South America much earlier than the Europeans, in 200 BC led by Asian sailors.