Sweet potatoes are a very versatile root vegetable. You can roast them, bake them into a pie, turn them into the third best kind of fries, and apparently, you can make them an integral part of the colonization of the Polynesian islands.
Sweet potatoes are not native to Polynesia, but instead emerged thousands of miles away in Central and South America. Still, the tasty root vegetable has become a staple of island cuisine. While the crop was known to have arrived in eastern Polynesia sometime after human settlement in 900 AD, and then spread westward toward New Zealand, scientists have debated exactly how and when it got there. Some evidence suggests that sweet potato seeds reached the region through natural means, including birds, wind, and ocean currents. Now, new research suggests that the crop’s presence was a major factor in enabling human expansion across the Polynesian islands.
A team of archaeologists led by Professor Ian Barber of the University of Otago scoured the New Zealand island of Te Wāhipounamu in search of remains of ancient kūmara, as the Maori call sweet potatoes. They found what they were looking for at Triangle Flat, an area that once housed a Maori farming complex. In the sand they found sweet potato pellets, which they later carbon-dated.
The results showed that the crop could have been planted as early as 1290 AD, more than 100 years earlier than previously believed on the island, and around the same time that the first settlers began colonizing the southernmost islands of Polynesia. As Barber wrote in his later studypublished on Wednesday in the magazine AntiqueThe findings suggest that sweet potatoes were one of the first crops planted by colonists. In fact, the availability of sweet potatoes as a crop may have been one of the factors that made colonization of the islands possible in the first place.
The vegetable is known for its hardiness and the speed at which it grows. Polynesia is a vast network of more than 1,000 islands, and colonizers needed hardy crops to survive as they expanded into new territories with cooler climates than those of islands closer to the equator. In a press release, Barber suggested that Polynesians may have been motivated by the knowledge that they had such a robust food source at their disposal.
“The resilience of the American sweet potato, as bequeathed by continental evolution, may have helped motivate early migrants to cross cooler waters to the southern Polynesian islands, where the kūmara would perform better,” he said.
Barber’s research could have broader impacts. According According to the International Potato Center, more than 105 million metric tons of the crop are produced worldwide each year, making it the world’s fifth most important crop. However, climate change threatens to impact production, as regions that produce a lot of the crop could warm dramatically by 2070. Barber expressed hope that studying sweet potato propagation could uncover new ways to improve the crop’s resilience. If that happens, you’ll know who to thank for saving your favorite Thanksgiving dish.