1,000-year-old Chinese melon seeds reveal savory, not sweet, fruit
Walker-Hale N, Zheng Y, Verdenaud M, Pereira L, Pérez-Escobar OA
Ethnobotany
The melon on your cutting board today descends from a long line of fruit that people bred for looks and cooking use long before anyone selected for sugar, and this seed DNA shows exactly when that shift toward sweetness hadn't happened yet.
Researchers pulled genetic material out of two melon seeds buried nearly a thousand years ago during China's Song dynasty and read enough of their DNA to figure out what those melons looked and tasted like. The seeds carried genes for green flesh and yellow-orange skin rather than the sweet orange flesh of modern dessert melons, meaning people back then were likely eating them as savory, cucumber-like fruits in cooking rather than as a sugary snack. One seed even showed the genetic switch that produces rounder fruit, hinting that farmers were already shaping how melons grew and looked, matching the melon-shaped ceramics popular at the time.
Key Findings
Two Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) melon seeds were sequenced at 5.5x and 2.1x nuclear genome coverage, placing them within the East Asian 'agrestis' cultivated melon gene pool.
Neither seed carried the orange-flesh allele associated with sweet dessert melons; one had a yellow/orange peel allele, the other had green-flesh and reduced-acidity alleles.
One seed carried the derived andromonoecy allele linked to rounder fruit shape, suggesting early human selection on melon morphology roughly 1,000 years ago.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists extracted DNA from 1,000-year-old melon seeds found in China and discovered these ancient melons were savory, green-fleshed culinary fruits rather than the sweet dessert melons we eat today.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Ancient DNA reveals early use of melons in China's Song dynasty.
Melon (Cucumis melo L.) domestication is thought to have occurred independently once in Northeast Africa and twice in India, but archaeobotanical seed remains point to a possible additional domesti...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Species Mentioned
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Gene editing removes 97% of celiac-triggering proteins from bread wheat
It could mean that people with celiac disease — roughly 1 in 100 worldwide — may one day safely eat bread made from real wheat, without sacrificing the taste...
A melon is any of various plants of the family Cucurbitaceae with sweet, edible, and fleshy fruit. It can also specifically refer to Cucumis melo, commonly known as the "true melon" or simply "melon". The term "melon" can apply to both the plant and its fruit. Botanically, a melon is a kind of be...