LONDON: What led that chocolate bar in your hand was a genetic tweak that happened about 10 million years ago.
Historians previously assumed that cocoa dated back 3,100 years after traces were found in Central America.
Chocolate comes from the cacao pods that grow on the Theobroma cacao tree. Theobroma literally means ‘food of the gods’ in Latin.
This also suggests that the chocolate producing tree is much older than previously thought.
It also shows that the tree’s ancient roots had great genetic diversity.
“We show for the first time that the source of chocolate, Theobroma cacao, is remarkably old for an Amazonian plant species,” study lead author James Richardson, a tropical botanist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland, said in a statement.
Most of these trees are genetically very similar which makes them susceptible to climate change, political instability, pests and diseases.
The new findings hold out hope that some of the cacao trees lurking in the forests of the Amazon could provide the genetic variance needed to fight off disease in the future, the researchers wrote in the paper.
