 |
Although the country is flat, peach kernel prehistoric looks more like a modern version of sighting today - oval with deep grooves. But researchers mention the size may be smaller than peaches sold in the market today. With a diameter of only 2 inches or about 5 cm.
"If you imagine the smallest peach on sale now, something like that size. These seeds must have once fleshy. Definitely delicious," said Professor paleobotany at Pennsylvania State University, Peter Wilf, as quoted by Live Science,
Su Tao, a young professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Yunna province, China - a colleague Wilf - collect 8 peach fossil found during the construction of new roads near the North Bus Terminal in Kunming, the provincial capital.
The fruit fossils found in rock layers are derived from the final stage of the Pliocene epoch, a geologic period of 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago.
These seeds really looks like a peach pit today that Su and his colleagues conducted a series of tests to ensure that the seeds did not come from the recent past, such as discarded by construction workers after edible fruit.
By scanning the fossils in the Penn State, Wilf and Su found that seed in the seed has been replaced by iron ore and the walls have been re-crystallized - a sign of a very old age.
The researchers also tried to determine the age of fossils peach by calculating the amount of carbon-14 decays - common ways used to determine the age of organic carcass. But the results show that the fossil came from a period beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, which is currently around 50,000 years.
Peach ascribed to China, and historical sources prove that the fruit was cultivated in China for centuries. Peaches is mentioned in the Book of Songs, or Shi Jing, the oldest poetry collection in China, as well as works from the eleventh to the seventh century BC.
Evidence of activity takes peaches are also found in archaeological sites such as the Neolithic settlement discovered in the village of Hemudu, Zhejiang province - where the discovery of 8,000-year-old peach pit in 1970.
The researchers in this latest study surmised, this evidence shows that peaches evolved through natural selection and then through human cultivation. As published online Nov. 26 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.
Peaches may be an attractive food source for fruit-eating primates, including human ancestors such as Homo erectus and Homo sapiens are extinct who arrived in China on the Pleistocene age. The researchers revealed that eating a peach initially may have inadvertently helped the spread of these plants through their droppings.
"The peach is a witness of human colonization in China," said Wilf. "Peaches was already there before humans, we adapt to each other and peaches."
Though the researchers consider that peaches can be likened to a prehistoric species existing peach (Prunus persica), they have filed a new species name is Prunus kumingensis, because they can not fully reconstruct these plants by seed only.
0 Response to "Found Peaches 2.5 Million Years Old, Like What?"
Posting Komentar