The modern potato traces back to an ancient chance encounter between a wild tomato and a small tuberless plant approximately nine million years ago in South America, in a hybrid event that produced the first underground storage organ neither parent could have made on its own

The potato is the third most important staple crop on Earth. Together with wheat, rice, and maize, it provides approximately 80 per cent of all the calories consumed by the human species. Approximately 7,000 years ago, on the shores of Lake Titicaca in what is now Bolivia and Peru, humans began cultivating the plant that [...] The post The modern potato traces back to an ancient chance encounter between a wild tomato and a small tuberless plant approximately nine million years ago in South Ameri