Has coffee been around longer than modern form of humans?
The humble coffee plant is way older than originally throught, which makes you wonder why it took humans until the 1400s to realise what they had growing nearby.
With experts now saying coffee is 600,000 years old, it's sobering to think that the modern form of humans only evolved around 200,000 years ago.
Okay, human life has been around for around six million years, but popping into Starbucks for a skinny latte was maybe the last thing on their minds.
So how do we know coffee has a longer history than we originally throught? Well, it comes down to how long a coffee plant has been growing on the planet. Researchers built a family tree based on the coffea arabica plant, which supplies our most favorite type of coffee, and found the species evolved over half-a-million years ago via the natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species.
The researchers main objective was to discover more about the plants and help protect them from pests and climate change.
Wild coffee plants were first observed in Ethiopia. But as to when the coffee bean was first roasted and brewed to produce a cup of coffee, this was thought to be in the 15th century in Yemen. Two centuries later and legend has it that Indian monk Baba Budan smuggled some raw coffee beans back to his homeland, and Starbucks was born (well, to be precise, Starbucks started in 1971 in the US, so a little off).
Arabica is the world's most popular coffee flavour, accounting for around 70% of the market.
The journal Nature Genetic published the study which was co-led by University of Buffalo.
