UNVEILING THE EARLIEST DOMESTICATION OF CACAO
ECUADOR

Our love affair with chocolate is much older than we thought; recently discovered traces of cocoa on ancient pottery suggest it started in the rainforests of what is now Ecuador some 5 500 years ago.

IN SEARCH OF THE CRADLE OF CACAO

The ancient civilizations of Central America*, including the Olmec and Maya, processed cocoa seeds to produce drinks for use in rituals and feasts according to ancient texts and ethnohistoric accounts. Some researchers thought these civilizations were the first to take cocoa pods from the Theobroma cacao tree, drying, fermenting, roasting, and grinding them into a paste used to make the beverages.

Various researchers/cacao-aficionados wondered whether cocoa had an earlier, lost history…
Genetic studies hinted as much, confirming that the cocoa tree is at its most genetically diverse in the humid forests of the upper Amazon. This suggests the upper Amazon is where all wild cocoa trees originally grew, and where humans would have had the original opportunity to exploit and cultivate it.

DOMESTICATION OF CACAO SHIFTS 1 400 MILES & 1 500 YEARS

The cacao tree, and in particular the drinks made from its dried seeds, has long been linked to the Maya and other ancient civilisations in Mesoamerica.

In the meantime, archaeologists and researchers showed already for some time that the cradle of cocoa is the Amazon basin, and that the first domestic use is Mayo Chinchipe-related.

The oldest traces of cacao domestication were recently found in the village of Santa Ana-La Florida (present Ecuador); these remains are even 200 years older than the evidence previously discovered in Jaén (located in the northern Amazon of present-day Peru).

WHEN ROAD CONSTRUCTIONS & POTTERY HUSTLING MEET INDIANA JONES

Fast forward to the ‘early oughties’, when some basic local road construction works in the ancient Ecuadorian village Santa Ana-La Florida revealed some interesting artefacts. With the help of a local truck driver -who by then had a flourishing side-business dealing ancient pottery-, a team of Ecuadorian and French researchers found the exact location. Their investigations disclosed that the site was an important ceremonial center with a temple and a series of underground burial chambers.

They not only discovered the oldest known site of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, which occupied the western Amazon around 5 500 years ago, but they also found various objects and elaborate pottery. Some vessels reminded them of the ones that the Maya used to make cacao, so they were curious to find out if there would be any chance that these vessels might also have been used for cacao.

CACAO HERITAGE – THE RESULTS FROM THE JURY OF EXPERTS

After elaborate analyzation**, it turned out that the 5 500-year-old vessels and a piece of a mortar were found to contain traces of theobromine, a marker for cacao. It confirms what botanists have long suspected – that the Amazonian region is where we might expect to find some of the first use

Other important info has been provided with the DNA mapping of Theobroma Cacao. This first in-depth genetic studies of cacao has identified different genetic varieties in Ecuador, in addition to the more well-known Nacional. This is reinforcing the idea that Theobroma Cacao originated from this area, and was only subsequently taken to Central America.

The people of Santa Ana-La Florida likely domesticated the plant, given that they found cocoa residue on 19 different artifacts used over the course of thousands of years. But domesticating a long-lived tree species might not have left a strong genetic signature until the trees were exported to Central America, where there are no wild cocoa trees to interbreed with domesticated forms.

The Maya and other Mesoamericans most certainly continued to domesticate cacao varieties to suit their particular tastes. One can argue that the Maya turned the consumption of cacao into an art form.

SWEET MATCH MADE IN THE UPPER AMAZON

Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no valley low enough, ain’t no river wide enough, ain’t no jungle mysterious enough to keep our Silva team from sourcing unique cacao beans with an identity.

Only a few weeks ago, our chief cacaopreneur put on her jungle boots, went into the pristine Ecuadorian Amazonian and discovered some exquisite original (literally and figuratively) beans with a unique taste and identity.

Katrien not only met up with the local farmers -she exchanged some savouring stories, and sampled some sweet cacao…- but on top of that she returned to the base with delightfull stories, mysterious samplings and exciting & promising plans…..

… STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 OF OUR ECUADORIAN ADVENTURE
IN WHICH WE WILL UNWRAP A SWEET, SAVOURY SURPRISE…

Footnotes

*people living in a region that now includes Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

**They have now used three independent lines of evidence to argue that the ancient vessels—which include unadorned bowls and elaborately decorated spouted bottles—once held cocoa. They scraped charred cooking residue from the inside of pot sherds for analysis and found they contained starch grains with a shape only seen in cocoa tree seed pods. They also had the chemical signature of theobromine, a compound present only in mature cocoa seeds. The final clincher came from an analysis of ancient DNA extracted from the pottery, which matched sequences from modern cocoa trees.