Ancient South Americans tasted chocolate 1,500 years before anyone else
Archaeological finds are the earliest evidence for cacao use in the world
By Bruce Bower
Ancient South Americans domesticated and consumed cacao, the plant from which chocolate is made, long before other people did, a new study finds.
Artifacts with traces of cacao suggest that an Amazonian culture located in what’s now Ecuador developed a wide-ranging taste for cacao products between 5,450 and 5,300 years ago, researchers report online October 29 in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Societies in southern Mexico and Central America, such as the Olmec and Maya, didn’t start concocting their better known and more intensively studied chocolatey drinks for roughly another 1,500 years.