Which came first, the chili, or the pot to cook it in?

First domesticated in Latin America, the capsicum family of vegetables have spread across the world, becoming favorites of cooks and diners across six continents. Whether you prefer yours in a burrito or chili, goulash, piri piri or vindaloo, until the European conquest of the Americas, the capsicum family of chili peppers were strictly a local thing. Now new research form a team led by Linda Perry at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and published in Science, has analysed microfossil remains from a range of sites across Central and South America to examine the spread of domesticated chili use. Although the humid conditions of the tropical lowlands are not well suited to preserving artefacts such as seeds, Perry and her colleagues have identified a particular kind of starch that comes from chili peppers. The starch has been detected on a range of artifacts such as grinding stones and pottery fragments but had previously been unidentified. The oldest dated samples were found in Ecuador, dating back around 6000 years ago. All of the samples found are from domesticated species of chili, and domestication is believed to have happened even earlier in what is now Bolivia. In some regions, such as Peru, microfossil record shows that chili cultivation predated the introduction of pottery. So, next time you're enjoying a particularly spicy meal, give a little thanks to that long forgotten Bolivian who decided it would be a good idea to start cultivating capsicums. http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/2/15/7072