It turns out, home to all kinds of apples – Kazakhstan.
“We managed to reduce the area of search for an alleged homeland of apples from all over Central Asia to a small area of Kazakhstan and China in the Western spurs of the Tian Shan. In addition, we followed the evolution of this fruit and its spread to the East and to the West via the silk road, and found that the appearance and taste of apples was varied at every step of this long journey, ” says Janczyn fairies from Cornell University in Ithaca (USA).
Apple, as today, scientists believe, have been domesticated relatively late, in fact, on the decline of antiquity, about four thousand years ago. According to Greek Chronicles, these fruits have been domesticated by Alexander the great, which took with them from Sogdiana, the most Northern and the Eastern provinces of the Persian Empire, the first seedlings of dwarf Apple trees.
In turn, modern genetic and species analysis points to two possible ancestral homeland of apples, Turkey, where today grow wild relatives of Apple trees and where there is maximum species diversity, and Central Asia, where it grows a direct ancestor of modern cultivars of these plants, Malus sieversii (Malus sieversii).
Fay and his colleagues uncovered the real homeland of apples, located in a mountainous area in the South-East of Kazakhstan and North-West China and find out what role in their development was played by the silk road, studying the DNA of hundreds of varieties of modern apples, traditionally popular in Asia and Europe.
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