Despite their incredible age, the pits seem basically identical to those found in modern peaches.
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The pits were discovered by Tao Su, associate professor at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, preserved in an exposed rock outcropping.
Like today’s peach pits, the prehistoric pits have an oval shape and deep grooves cut through the fossilized pit.
Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years.
According to researchers’ measurements, the ancient Prunus kunmingensis was the same size as the smallest peach variety we can find today.
It’s an important finding in scientists’ understanding of how Paleo peoples ate and how fruit like the peach evolved, according to a Discovery News report. Researchers think that while it may not have been early man, it was likely that some sort of primate of other animal had feasted on the sweet fruit.
“If you imagine the smallest commercial peach today, that’s what these would look like”, study co-author Peter Wilf said in a news release. With the help of an electron microscope analysis scientists were able to discover that the seeds were replaced by iron oxides. They looked at the amount of decaying carbon-14 inside the fossilized peach pits in order to measure the age of the fossilized peaches. But their results showed that the fossils were beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, which is now about 50,000 years. Also peach proofs have been found in the 1970 in Hemudu village at a Neolithic settlement discovery and were proved to be 8,000 years old.
Because the researchers can’t reconstruct the fruit from the pits, they can’t actually be sure that it would be similar enough to a modern peach to carry the same species name.
While peaches are widely popular, modern humans can’t take credit for the delectable fruits.
The study published online November 26 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports shows that peaches evolved under natural selection and later through human domestication. “It was there before humans, and through history, we adapted to it and it to us”. The striking observation: the fossils appeared nearly identical to peach pits today.
The most intriguing part of this discovery was that even if the pits were extremely old, dating back to a time before man had domesticated the fruit or even resided in the Chinese region, they are not that different from their current generation relatives.
The fruit remains culturally significant in the country, where it carries multiple meanings – from immortality in Taoist mythology to good fortune and beauty. “The peach was a witness to the human colonization of China”, Wilf said.
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After finding the fossils, Su brought them to Penn State. The team also estimated that the ancient finds had a diameter of about 5 centimeters (a little less than 2 inches) during the late Pliocene. “The answer is really both”, said Wilf.
