Your Beans of the Last Harvest and the Possible Adoption of Bright Ideas

This review considers which species of beans were domesticated out of a total of 80 or so species in tropical America, and the morpho- and ecological reasons and other nutritional aspects behind the choices of Amerindians who knew and experimented a lot with the flora. It explains why places of domestication refer to the locations where seeds of wild forms were picked for the last time. It further shows the current discrepancies between the archaeological records and the genetic data. The seven domestication events affecting the genus Phaseolus, five in Mesoamerica and two in the Andes, seem to have happened originally outside the presence of maize and before the wide use of ceramics, with food uses possibly different from the ones known nowadays (like toasting). The bright idea by Amerindians was to combine maize and beans into a performant agronomic and nutritional association that diffused so widely in pre-Columbian America and set the basis for the many brilliant civilizations they left us.