Imagine Szechwan, Thailand, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Europe waiting millennia for peppers to reach their shores.
Likewise, peanuts to Indonesia and Africa.
Somehow sweet potatoes got from the Amazon to Polynesia centuries before Europeans did.
There are two competing theories on the initial population of the Americas. The first was a land bridge theory which suggests hunter-gatherers tracked mammoths across the once-frozen Bering Strait bridge of modern Russia/Alaska, but a newer and more popular theory is that Polynesian peoples arrived by boat navigation.
Apparently, sweet potatoes arrived in Polynesia around 1,200 and 1,300 AD, which gives a lot of credit to the idea that the first human inhabitants of the Americas arrived by boat from Polynesia.
Polynesian came along tens of thousands of years later. They would have sailed across to Peru or Chile, and picked up sweet potato there. Surprisingly, not potatoes or peanuts, although they could have taken and then lost those.
We have certain evidence of hominins in California 130,000 years ago -- H. erectus, Neanderthal, Sap., or "other" -- although no evidence they left descendants.
Reading this article was pretty surreal and funny with this in mind. Everyone rushing to buy and eat their pawpaws for their mango and banana like flavor.
I wonder if you could cultivate it on a larger scale, the demand is there. Or maybe they are more like truffles and need to be foraged.
Interesting article, now I have to try it. On a similar note, people take for granted the fact that tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, vanilla, and blueberries all originated in the Americas.
Imagine ancient Rome without the tomato. Some things are so commonplace that we forget their origins.