The "Apples" of Eden

When Marco Polo visited India he said that the locals considered the banana as "Adam's apple."

Muslims and medieval Christians also believed the banana was the forbidden fruit and that Adam and Eve used banana leaves to cover themselves after the temptation. Previously we mentioned that the banana tree fit fairly well the description of the tree described in the Book of Enoch.

Greek legend speaks of the golden apples of the "Garden of the Hesperides" that was located "beyond the river Oceanus at the outer limits of the world."

The banana tree occurs as the tree of life or the tree of death, the two are related, in many Southeast Asian and Pacific cultures. In ancient Persia, the fruit was thought to grant perpetual youth. Interestingly in some Pacific cultures, as in ancient Hawai`i, the tree was forbidden to women -- something that reminds us of the temptation of Eve and the Freudian aspects of the banana. The taboo on bananas for women may be connected with the widespread notion in the Pacific that bananas increase male potency.

From the health standpoint, bananas are rich in mucilage, fiber, vitamins and minerals. THe plant is good at absorbing nutrients from the soil in the form of colloidal minerals. They are also one of the best sources of tryptophan, which regulates serotonin the neurotransmitter that affects mood and emotion.

An ester in banana oil gives the fruit's sweet fragrance which is known to strongly attract mosquitos.

Bananas may have been one of the first domesticated fruit crops. The practice of vegetative propagation of crops in Southeast Asia and the Pacific dates back to at least 17,000 years ago and possibly goes back even 30,000 years. The banana appears to have been cultivated starting at least 10,000 years ago.

The area between Indonesia and New Guinea is believed to have given rise to the diploid banana, the plantain and the hybrid "Maia Maoli/Popoulu" banana. The diversity of plantains is highest on the island of Luzon.

According to archaeologist Dr. Felix Chami the oldest bananas in Tanzania, using associative dating, may go back more than 4000 years. Evidence of bananas in southern Cameroon dates to about 2,500 years ago.

The diversity of banana species around the Great Lakes region suggests this is the area to which they were introduced from the east. Evidence of plantains in the same region dates to at least 3,000 years ago. The "Maia Maoli/Popoulu” banana seems to have been introduced into Ecuador during pre-Columbian times via transoceanic voyages possibly some 2,000 years ago.

If the banana was considered beneficial to health, how much more so those that came from the islands of the blessed where all the plants and mushrooms were thought to bestow renewed youth.

Here is an example of a myth with the banana as the tree of life/death:

http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/1998/11/01/lifestyle/life02.htm

An Indonesian legend gives the banana a crucial role at the beginning of human society: the Creator one day let down a stone on the end of a rope, as was his way with his gifts to his creatures. But the first man and woman scorned the stone and asked for something else.

The Creator complied, the story continues, and hauled away at the rope; the stone mounted up and up till it vanished from sight. Presently, the rope was seen coming down from Heaven again, and this time there was a banana at the end of it.

The man and woman were delighted, but then heard the patriarch's voice boom out: "Because ye have chosen the banana, your life shall be like its life. When the banana tree has offspring, the parent stem dies; so shall ye die and your children shall step into your place. Had ye chosen the stone, your life would have been like the life of stone, changeless and immortal."

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Sacramento

References

De Langhe, Edmond, Banana and Plantian: the earliest fruit crops? 2003, http://www.inibap.org/publications/annualreport/IN020267_eng.pdf

L. Vrydaghs1 and E. De Langhe, Phytoliths: an opportunity to rewrite history, 2003, http://www.inibap.org/publications/annualreport/IN030369_eng.pdf

New evidence of Cinnamon Route from Mtwapa, Kenya

An important story is circulating around in African popular publications, but unfortunately, maybe predictably, it has not been picked up yet by the Western popular media.

One version of the story of Dr. Chapurukha (Chap) Kusimba's research can be found at The East African website:

Digging for history in the sands of time
by Rupi Mangat

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/653420/-/item/0/-/mqc8qw/-/index.html

Here are two key paragraphs from the article on discoveries made by Dr. Kusimba, an archaeologist with the Field Museum in Chicago, at the Mtwapa ruins along the coast of southern Kenya:

“This era [the Holocene] sees the bi-directional flow of cultural objects and foods through trade over wide regions of the world. l’m particularly interested in how domestic rice, coconuts, chickens and the Indian cow (Bos indicus) reached Africa from Asia and how African domestic foods like sorghum and millet reached Asia and became staples in countries there.”

This list of trade items shows that many of these exchanges of crops between Africa and South East Asia through trade happened as early as 4,000 years ago.

Now obviously these discoveries are greatly supportive of the theories of J. I. Miller, myself and others about the ancient age of the Cinnamon Route.

In an email correspondence with Dr. Kusimba, I was able to find out that it was specifically the sorghum and millet from the Africa to Asia; and citrus fruit, bananas and Indica rice from Southeast Asia to Africa, that date back to about 4000 years ago (1732 BCE).

Chickens, probably from Insular Southeast Asia, date back at Mtwapa to about 1000 BCE, and the coconut finds have not been datable so far.

Previously I have discussed how banana phytoliths dating back to 500 BCE have been found in Nigeria, and dating to about 2500 BCE were discovered in Munsa, Uganda. Banana cultivation is complicated and labor-intensive so there is no doubt that these domesticated plants were carried to Africa by humans.

Dr. Kusimba mentions that East Africa was known to the ancient Romans as the "Cinnamon coast," and I have suggested earlier, following Miller, that the ancient port known as Rhapta in Greek texts was probably the Punt of the ancient Egyptians. Rhapta was located in the same area as the bustling medieval island ports of Pemba and Zanzibar in modern-day Tanzania. Evidence of chickens in Tanzania dates back to 2800 BCE. These islands are actually quite close to the Mtwapa ruins, which are just north of Mombasa. Possibly we can say that Mtwapa was in the same economic zone as Rhapta, and we cannot rule out that Mtwapa may have been the actual site of that ancient port.

There is evidence of cinnamon or cassia that has been found in animal mummies dating back to the XXIII Egyptian dynasty (818-715 BCE) by Dr. Stephen Buckley. He also found traces of cinnamon or cassia that he states probably came from Southeast Asia in the canopic jar of Djediufankh, which is dated to about 664 - 525 BCE. Cinnamon has also been found at a Hera temple on the island of Samos in Greece that dates back to the 7th century BCE. This evidence puts to rest the idea that that the cinnamon of the ancients that traveled up the eastern African coast was not the cinnamon of Asia that we know today.

It is also worth mentioning again the discovery of clove flower buds at Terqa, Syria, at roughly the same time as the earliest dates for Mtwapa. These cloves may have followed a different coastal route, which I have called the Clove Route, as opposed to the probably trans-oceanic Cinnamon Route that bypassed most of the Asian coast.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Sacramento

Banana phytoliths dating to the fourth millennium BCE in Munsa, Uganda.

Interesting article about the discovery of banana phytoliths dating to
the fourth millennium BCE in Munsa, Uganda.

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
http://sambali.blogspot.com/

---
Abstract

The recent discovery of banana phytoliths dating to the first
millennium BC in Cameroon has ignited debate about the timing of the
introduction of this important food crop to Africa. This paper
presents new phytolith evidence obtained from one of three sediment
cores from a swamp at Munsa, Uganda, that appears to indicate the
presence of bananas (Musa) at this site during the fourth millennium
BC. This discovery is evaluated in the light of existing knowledge of
phytolith taphonomy, the history of Musa, ancient Indian Ocean trade
and African prehistory.


http://www.naturalscience.tcd.ie/Interactions_papers/Africas%20earliest%20bananas_pub_ver.pdf

Regards,
Paul Kekai Manansala
Sacramento