Monte Verde Potato Project

The earliest evidence of wild potato use anywhere in the world comes from Monte Verde (southern Chile), where tuber fragments were recovered from hearths and food pits that date between 18,500 and 14,500 cal B.P. Those tubers were tentatively assigned to a wild potato species (Solanum maglia) based on their starch granule morphology. Recently, I and my colleagues have called into question that identification due to species-specific inconsistences in the size and shape of remnant starch granules. The goal of this project is to re-examine the previously-used starch granule criteria with more updated morphometric and morphological techniques. Ancient DNA analyses are currently being replicated in two labs: Genetics Lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the Ancient DNA Lab at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. The genetic analyses done so far offer intriguing results, but are currently inconclusive due to insufficient genome coverage. Therefore, we received additional funding to conduct more genomic sequencing.