Scientists Solve Mystery of World-Traveling Plant 52
sciencehabit writes "By land or by sea? That's the question scientists have been pondering for decades when it comes to the bottle gourd, a plant with a hard-skinned fruit that's used by cultures all over the world to make lightweight containers and other tools. Archaeologists know that people were using domesticated bottle gourds in the Americas as early as 10,000 years ago. But how did the plant make the jump from its original home in Africa to the New World with an ocean in the way? A new study overturns previous evidence pointing to a human-assisted land migration and concludes that the bottle gourd floated across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas on its own."
The mystery of Beta (Score:0, Insightful)
It is a mystery for what abomination of a user experience it was designed for. Scientists will be sleuthing for years!!
Re:Fungus is not a plant! (Score:2, Insightful)
That hasn't stopped RMS from cultivating toe jam and jelly not from a general store.
Re:Incomplete research perhaps? (Score:0, Insightful)
It seems like "science" want's you to believe that up until the white European everyone was sub-human and had trouble simply banging sticks together.
I really can't imagine why you believe this. The fact that vikings reached the East coast of North America is widely known today and no one of substance has any issue with it. The hoi polloi that consumes any amount of pop-sci media is well aware of it because it has appeared frequently in news reports, documentaries and books.
Sure, there are lots of folks that haven't learned anything new since the sixties. That's not "bias in Science."
Many people swear that Columbus was the first person in America still today
Cite someone that isn't a bonehead blogger or poaster in some forum. We're all perfectly well aware of native Americans and all the myriad injustices and deprivations they've been subjected to, so we spend our energies on squabbling over the names of our football teams ('redskins') because we've basically achieved paradise with precious little left to squabble about. I think your "many people" is a straw man.
Certainly no actual scientists around today believe Europeans were the first inhabitants of the Americas. In fact, that's never been true. Please cite for me one single bit of accredited science anywhere in history that has, as its premise, an uninhabited American continent on the arrival of Europeans.
This world of endemic eurocentric biased science is a fiction that exists inside your head. If anything, we've been vigorously purging our science of such bias with a self-loathing zeal.