Thread by @Shrikantha5

Tonight, I will be busting claim that #potatoes were brought to India by Vasco Da Gama similar to claims about Chili pepper, Banana, Barley, Rice, Maize, Coriander, Ginger and so on.
This thread needs you to know some science and some patience.
Please read & share.

Evolution is constant. And evolution teaches us to look for commonality to understand how things evolve and provide signs on what came first. This is the only way to bust the claims of Catholic Church which does not believe in evolution.

The taxonomy system divides all the living beings into
Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species.
This is how it is represented in Encyclopedia Britannica.
Order consists of multiple families.

Potato is not one single species but tens if not hundreds of closely related species of which Solanum Tuberosum is most widely known.
See the Wagner tree to identify various species of Potatoes. See how vast it is because of breeding across families.

Given this kind of variation it is difficult to prove who came first among these potatoes till we have entire genome mapped out. I am sure Indian scientists will use same method which was used to bust the chili myth. But till that time, I think we must go one or two step up.

So instead of getting lost among various cultivars and species of potato, I will go two steps up to the order of Solanales. This is order of potato with 4080 species of potato like plants.

Then I will search for fossilized remains of of plant from Solanales Order to check the origin. Where do we find the earliest fossil of Solanales Order!

David Dilcher of Indiana University with help from Gaurav Shrivastava and Rakesh Mehrotra of Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences rose up to this challenge and answered this question!

I have provided link to their article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) USA.
PNAS is a prestigious journal. The article published is of very high quality.

Quoting the journal

"we report fossil leaves of Ipomoea (Convolvulaceae) from the late Paleocene (Thanetian; ∼58.7–55.8 Ma) of Meghalaya (25° 26′ 47.4″ N), India (Fig. 1 A and B), which was located ∼7° S paleolatitude (19)". contd.

... "These fossil leaves represent the earliest record of Convolvulaceae and also Solanales"

Yes!

Indian state of Meghalaya is now the origin of order of potatoes.

Now I remember Laloo singing .. jab tak samose me aloo.

Entire theory that Vasco da Gama got potatoes to India is questionable because Meghalaya had fossilized plants belonging to order of potatoes.
And these fossils are dated much before Vasco or much before mythical figure of Jesus came.

The fossils found in Meghalaya are dated to 58.7–55.8 million years ago!

So hopefully I have slayed this potato story of the catholic church very convincingly.
This myth too is now busted. Share it widely. Decolonize.

Reference:
pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…