Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff lorn vogoba here. Back before pumpkin pies were
Speaker 1: even a glimmer in the eyes of Bakers, Eistocene era mastodons,
Speaker 1: mammoths and giant sloths were spreading the seeds of these
Speaker 1: fruit far and wide. Anywhere that these huge animals, collectively
Speaker 1: known as megafauna roamed would become a dumping ground, if
Speaker 1: you'll pardon the pun. Before these seeds of pumpkins squash
Speaker 1: and other members of the genus Cucurbetta, which would then
Speaker 1: spring up from those seeds. But while these wild fruits
Speaker 1: were nourishing giant animals, these ancestral pumpkins were not yet
Speaker 1: part of the diet of humans or smaller animals due
Speaker 1: to the plant's toxicity and better taste. A study by
Speaker 1: an international group of researchers who looked at Gordon squash
Speaker 1: seeds in Mastodon dung has shown that the extinction of
Speaker 1: megafauna about twelve thousand years ago lead in a rather
Speaker 1: roundabout way, to the evolution of Cucurbitda from the toxic
Speaker 1: and bitter into the pasty pumpkins and other winter squash
Speaker 1: that we enjoy for Thanksgiving, and which in turn evolved
Speaker 1: into the now ubiquitous pumpkin spice lattes, beers, and ice creams.
Speaker 1: Though note that there is a difference between pumpkin flavoring
Speaker 1: and pumpkin spice flavoring. The latter may be made up
Speaker 1: with fall pie spices like allspice, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg,
Speaker 1: and have no actual pumpkin flavoring involved. But how could
Speaker 1: the extinction of megafauna back then a lad us even
Speaker 1: in a roundabout way to autumn's most used fall flavor. Now,
Speaker 1: I think of coevolution, that is, when two or more
Speaker 1: species mutually affect each other's evolution. For the article, this
Speaker 1: episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Lee Newsom,
Speaker 1: co author of the studying question and an associate professor
Speaker 1: of anthropology at and State. She said, there's a whole
Speaker 1: suite of plants that have co evolved. It's called dispersal mutualism.
Speaker 1: With animals, there's a large number that are co evolved
Speaker 1: with mammals. Some just hitch a ride on mammal fur
Speaker 1: then ultimately fall off somewhere. The fruit of other plants,
Speaker 1: such as the wild gourds that giant sloths and wooly
Speaker 1: rhinos chowed on, are eaten and their seeds expelled, maybe
Speaker 1: miles from where the original plant grew. Imagine automobile sized
Speaker 1: mastodons running rampant across the environment of what's now North
Speaker 1: Florida and Georgia, eating wild gourds, then expelling seeds which
Speaker 1: are still lodged in the dung that Newsome and her
Speaker 1: team found and studied. As the environment warmed following the
Speaker 1: most recent ice age and the large mammals became extinct,
Speaker 1: Newsome explained, quote the plants were left without their primary
Speaker 1: partner and disperser, but enter a new partner us and
Speaker 1: Nuson explained, by then humans were present, and we're starting
Speaker 1: to make use of wild gourds and squash for containers,
Speaker 1: and ultimately humans are planting the seeds and changing them.
Speaker 1: As the plants evolved, it adapted to the new environment.
Speaker 1: Smaller animals found that some of the cucurbidda didn't taste
Speaker 1: as bitter anymore. Over that dozen millennia that have passed
Speaker 1: since the end of the place to see an ice age,
Speaker 1: wild gourds and squash evolved into the tasty foods we
Speaker 1: eat today. So next time you're chowing down on a
Speaker 1: pumpkin pie, squash casserole, or pumpkin spice latte, remember the
Speaker 1: mastodons and they're dung. Without the demise of megafauna, pumpkins
Speaker 1: might have remained bitter and unpleasant to our palate and
Speaker 1: would have a much less flayorful diet. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: based on the article Mastodons and mammoths gave their lives
Speaker 1: so you could have pumpkin spice latte on house to
Speaker 1: Works dot Com, written by Karen Kirkpatrick. Brain Sets production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and partnership with has stuff works
Speaker 1: dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
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