The ancestors of the grapes used in winemaking today likely originated in the tropical regions of the Americas and the Caribbean about 60 million years ago, according to a new study.
Researchers have found fossilized grape seeds that date back millions of years, shedding light on the early history of these plants.
Paleobotanists discovered nine different species of grape seeds, ranging from 20 million to 60 million years old, in Panama, Colombia, and Peru.
The oldest seeds came from plants related to the Vitoideae subfamily, which includes the grapes we use today for wine and other purposes.
Mónica Carvalho, a paleobotanist at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the study published in Nature Plants, explained the significance of these findings.
“In excavating the fossil record in the New World tropics, we found seeds related to the grape family that date back to 60 million years ago. This led us to revise the fossil record of grapes in the New World.”
Carvalho, who is also an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences and an assistant curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology, added, “The oldest seed we found is closely related to the large group that gave rise to commercial grapes, the Vitoideae subfamily.”
The fossil record of grapes in the New World has a complex history of extinction and dispersal. Some groups of this family, like the genus Leea and species of the tribe Cayrateae, only live today in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific. However, their fossils show that they lived in the New World for a long time before becoming extinct in that region.
Around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous Period, an asteroid impact caused the extinction of dinosaurs and wiped out many forests in the tropical regions of the New World. New rainforests grew in their place, leading to the diversification of many modern plant and animal groups. Carvalho and lead author Fabiany Herrera, a paleobotanist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, studied the fossil record from this time to understand the evolution of modern rainforests.
“In these early neotropical rainforests, we find the earliest record of Vitoideae, indicating that the lineage of grapes dates back to the origin of the first neotropical rainforests,” Carvalho said.
Herrera highlighted the importance of their discovery. “It shows that after the extinction of the dinosaurs, grapes began to spread across the world.”
The grape family has a long fossil record that predates the Cretaceous extinction event. The oldest grapes, dating back to the age of dinosaurs, were found in India. Seeds from these ancient plants may have been carried by animals to the New World.
“The diversification of birds and mammals after the end-Cretaceous extinction could have helped in dispersing their seeds,” Herrera noted.
Carvalho emphasized that their study fills a significant gap in the history of grapes in the Americas and the Caribbean. “By about 50 million years ago, we see fossil grapes in North America and Europe. At that time, when the planet was warmer, grapes had a wider distribution in high northern latitudes, but we didn’t know much about their history in tropical latitudes. That’s where our work comes in.”
This research not only reveals the ancient origins of the grapes we enjoy today but also enhances our understanding of the evolution and spread of plant species in response to major environmental changes.
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Source: University of Michigan.
