The Arabica coffee variety predates any human intervention.
The most popular type of coffee, preferred by many people in the morning, may be more than half a million years old, writes the New York Post, citing a study published in Nature.
“Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world’s most popular coffee variety, known to scientists as Coffea arabica. Researchers discovered that the species originated about 600,000 years ago through a natural cross between two other coffee species,” writes edition.
Thus, the Arabica coffee variety appeared before any human intervention.
Wild coffee trees originated in Ethiopia, but they are believed to have first been roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen, beginning in the 1400s. According to legend, in the 1600s, an Indian monk smuggled seven raw coffee beans into his homeland from Yemen, setting the stage for a global coffee takeover.
It is noted that the population of the Arabica plant fluctuated over thousands of years before people began to cultivate it, thriving during warm and wet periods and suffering during dry periods. These lean times created what are known as population bottlenecks, where only a small number of genetically similar plants survived.
Today, this makes Arabica plants more vulnerable to diseases such as coffee leaf rust, which cause billions of dollars in losses each year.
UNIAN previously talked about the right time to drink your first cup of coffee in the morning. It turns out that drinking coffee immediately after waking up is very harmful.
