De Castro, Kaye Chell R.

BSAII

BANANA
The origins of the banana are as complex and convoluted as the nature of
the bananas taxonomic origins themselves. Archeologists have focused
on the Kuk valley of New Guinea around 8,000 BCE (Before Common Era)
as the area where humans first domesticated the banana. Additionally,
though this is the first known location of banana domestication, other
spontaneous domestication projects may have occurred throughout the
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Therefore, Kuk is the first known
instance of banana domestication, but it is probably not the cradle from
which all other domesticated species sprang.
From New Guinea, the Kuk domesticated variety appears to have spread to
the Philippines, and then radiated widely across the tropics. Researchers
find it difficult to trace the diffusion of the banana after its arrival in the
Philippine islands, and in many cases, it appears the banana was
introduced into areas only to be reintroduced, and in a sense,
rediscovered, hundreds or thousands of years later. Adding to the
confusing tangle of banana proliferation is the parallel development of
hybrid fruits. Human ingenuity manipulated the seedless, and thus
asexual, forms of domesticated bananas into hybrids by careful techniques
of culling and planting that fused and refined different domesticated
varieties. Thus, the origins of the banana have been difficult at best to
pinpoint. In general, however, it can be said that bananas originated in
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific around 8,000 to 5,000 BCE.
From New Guinea and the Philippines, bananas dispersed far and wide
across the tropics, in all directions. It is probable that bananas arrived in
India, Indonesia, Australia, and Malaysia, within the first two millennia
after domestication. Plantains may have been grown in eastern Africa as
early as 3000 BCE, and in Madagascar by 1000 BCE. The plantain had
certainly reached the African continent between 500 BCE and 500 CE.
Buddhist literature notes the existence of the banana in 600 BCE, and
when Alexander the Greats expeditions led him to India in 327 BCE, he
stumbled across the fruit. Perhaps most surprising, the banana may have
arrived in South America well ahead of Europeans, as early as 200 BCE,
carried by sailors of Southeast Asian origin. By the 3rdcentury CE,
plantains were being cultivated on plantations in China.
Bananas were redistributed and rediscovered for a second time around the
Indian Ocean world carried by the wave of Islam. Referenced in Islamic
literature in the 11th century BCE, muslim merchants carried the banana
along trade routes to and from various places in South Asia and the Middle
East. By the 1200s, the banana had reached into North Africa and in
Moorish-controlled Spain. It is also likely that Islamists carried the banana
from eastern to western Africa.
A third wave of banana diffusion occurred in both Asia and in Europe. By
the 1200s, Japanese cultivators harvested specific banana varieties for
their fibers, to forge into textiles for clothes and other fabrics. Through

selective use of banana fibers and processing techniques involving lye

soaks, Japanese textile production from bananas
could be either soft
enough for use in the creation of prized kimonos and other traditional
wear, or coarse enough for use as table cloth. In Europe, meanwhile, the
Moorish invasions had likely brought the banana for the first time into the
continent. By the 15thand 16th century, Portuguese sailors were
establishing the crop throughout Brazil, where it likely spread to the sugar
plantation economies of the New World and the Caribbean.
Banana production and consumption in the ancient and early modern
world was mostly geared towards small-scale operations. Though
individual fingers, hands, and bunches were more than likely available for
sale through commercial exchanges, most banana production occurred as
a small-scale operation for local consumption. The bananas importance
as a staple crop would have been well established, and its major use was
likely as either the main starch consumed, or, given its non-seasonal
nature, as an important buffer crop between other staple harvests.
However, large-scale operations were certainly evident, as Chinas
plantation complex and the presence of bananas in colonial New World
attests.
For colonial plantations, plantains had two major uses. The first use
was as a valuable intercropping plant. Coffee, cacao, and pepper
plantations relied upon indirect or varied times of sunlight, and the banana
plant, with its towering leaves, offered the perfect crop to shade the
valuable commodities. Thus, bananas were valuable not for their fruit, but
rather for the shelter their leaves provided other, more important
plantation commodities. Secondly, New World sugarcane plantations
relied upon bananas to feed their slave populations. Not only did bananas
provide a non-labor intensive crop for plantation workers, the fruits easy
digestibility and high energy content provided the perfect source of
calories for the brutal manual labor of the cane fields. Plantains had
become thoroughly ubiquitous in Central and South American countries,
and had even been naturalized, that is, adopted and integrated into
local cultures so much so they became synonymous with certain countries
cuisines, such as Cuba.
Thus, the plantains major importance as a crop during the ancient
and early modern world, whether on large-scale or small-scale farms, was
a major staple for local consumption. Even in the case of Japanese
production, where banana plants were cultivated for use in textiles and not
as a foodstuff, the banana was grown for local markets. By the 1800s, and
especially into the early twentieth century, shifts in modes of production
and consumption moved the banana from a local to a global commodity.

Source:
Banana.
Banana
Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Banana; accessed on 10 June 2008.

the

Free

Encyclopedia.

De Langhe, Edmund.
Banana and Plantain: the Earliest Fruit
Crops? Montpellier:
International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain,
Focus Paper
1. INIBAP Annual Report 1995, 6-8.
Heslop-Harrison, J.H. and Trude Schwarzacher. Domestication, Genomics,
and the
Future for Banana, Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (2007): 1073-1084.