Potatoes and the Andean crops
Farmers on the high altiplano domesticate tubers and grains that grow where cereals cannot.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Potatoes are domesticated near Lake Titicaca from around 8000 BCE, alongside quinoa, oca and ulluco. The Andes present a problem no other agricultural centre faces — extreme altitude, frost and thin air — and the solution is a set of crops tolerant of all three, plus freeze-drying techniques that turn potatoes into chuno storable for years. The potato later transforms European demography, and its narrow genetic base there causes the Irish famine.