A team of archaeologists has recently made a discovery that, while it probably won't make it into may children's picture books - unlike many of the discoveries about past civilizations - could very well make it into a cookbook someday. They discovered the remains of the world's first home-grown chili peppers in what is now western Ecuador. The discovery derailed the long-standing belief that residents of higher and more arid areas, like what are now Peru and Mexico, were the first to grow chilies by more than 1,000 years. There is no question about the time frame for the existence of the chili plants that were identified by "microfossils from grinding stones and charred ceramic cookware" because there has been so much study done of the pottery that "the dates [are] all very tight."
This discovery shows that chili peppers were one of the oldest domesticated foods in the world. More research is planned to try and discover exactly how the people living in villages in Ecuador at that time used the chilies.
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