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Pre-Columbian Contact with the New World


Lord Harry

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I see. I had the mistaken impression that the seeds were contained in the tubers. It's common practice to  grow sweet potatoes from the sprouting tubers.  I'm inclined to conduct an experiment, where a sweet potato is kept floating in a jar of brine, with a similar concentration of salt to the sea. The object: to see if it could sprout, and live long enough to make trans oceanic distribution of living specimens credible. Before doing that, though, I want to check on the salt tolerance of sweet potatoes, under normal circumstances.    

Edited by bison
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Yeah... sweet potatoes are typically grown from slips- those are what the sprouts are called. They require a really long growing season and other pollinating plants in order to produce seeds- sweet potatoes don't have perfect flowers. Sometimes some confusion comes in because often sweet potato (and potato) tubers are called seed or seeding sweet potatoes (or potatoes).

Potatoes of course are a completely different plant family and is a tuberous stem and gets chitted instead of slipped. But a lot of folks have some of the same confusion with both.

I'm not sure how well trying to get a sweet potato to grow slips while in saltwater is going to go.. but give it a try. I've been slipping my own sweet potatoes for a few years, and it's really easy to do.

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As it turns out, sweet potatoes are usually moderately sensitive to salt. Not such good news for my idea ! My hope is that floating in brine, instead of packed in soil that receives salt water will constitute a different enough set of conditions to help matters. Floating, and only being partially exposed to the brine may also help.

I've seen directions for sprouting a sweet potato in plain water, which could presumably also be applied to brine. Some use the whole tuber, some use half, cut across the short axis.   

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50 minutes ago, bison said:

As it turns out, sweet potatoes are usually moderately sensitive to salt. Not such good news for my idea ! My hope is that floating in brine, instead of packed in soil that receives salt water will constitute a different enough set of conditions to help matters. Floating, and only being partially exposed to the brine may also help.

I've seen directions for sprouting a sweet potato in plain water, which could presumably also be applied to brine. Some use the whole tuber, some use half, cut across the short axis.   

Salt water is very different from plain old water (I'm going to skip a lot of chemistry of fresh water here, which also varies wildly) but salt is very toxic to terrestrial plants: http://www.uvm.edu/pss/ppp/articles/salt1.htm  

There are a few that can tolerate high salt areas, but they're very few (and desert plants at that.)

And brine is used to pickle things.  I think that in a few months you'll have sweet potato pickles - though probably not as tasty as these: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/sweet-potato-pickles/7132/?utm_term=.866ae399ecc1

 

Edited by Kenemet
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5 minutes ago, Kenemet said:

Salt water is very different from plain old water (I'm going to skip a lot of chemistry of fresh water here, which also varies wildly) but salt is very toxic to terrestrial plants: http://www.uvm.edu/pss/ppp/articles/salt1.htm  

There are a few that can tolerate high salt areas, but they're very few (and desert plants at that.)

And mangroves!

Sorry -- I know one thing about botany and that's it. I get excited when I can contribute a modest science thing.

--Jaylemurph

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8 hours ago, bison said:

As it turns out, sweet potatoes are usually moderately sensitive to salt. Not such good news for my idea ! My hope is that floating in brine, instead of packed in soil that receives salt water will constitute a different enough set of conditions to help matters. Floating, and only being partially exposed to the brine may also help.

I've seen directions for sprouting a sweet potato in plain water, which could presumably also be applied to brine. Some use the whole tuber, some use half, cut across the short axis.   

Yes, sweet potatoes are sensitive to salt, much like many other plants. That's why I said I wasn't sure how well that would turn out. Well, there are some experimental GMO sweet potatoes that have been made with salt resistance, but you won't be able to get one of those- and they didn't exist in pre-Columbian times so woudn't be right to use for your experiment anyway.

And if you use soil- don't pack it in. You need to nestle the potato partly into the soil, be gentle. If you sprout in water, make sure your terminal end is in the right direction and water levels remain clean and consistent.

7 hours ago, Kenemet said:

Salt water is very different from plain old water (I'm going to skip a lot of chemistry of fresh water here, which also varies wildly) but salt is very toxic to terrestrial plants: http://www.uvm.edu/pss/ppp/articles/salt1.htm  

There are a few that can tolerate high salt areas, but they're very few (and desert plants at that.)

And brine is used to pickle things.  I think that in a few months you'll have sweet potato pickles - though probably not as tasty as these: https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/sweet-potato-pickles/7132/?utm_term=.866ae399ecc1

 

Brine is used to pickle things indeed- and the recipe you provided sounds yummy, I might have to try that. It's what's considered a fresh fridge pickle.

What bison suggests would be a lacto-ferment sort of, sitting in salt or saltwater at room temp till the product ferments. With lacto-ferments base salt brine is typically 2-3.5% with some things needing up to 10%- this helps suppress the bad things till the good things can bloom. Sea water is 3.5%, which could be suitable for lacto-fermenting sweet potatoes- but the non-submersion of the potato would probably lead to a quickly rotted top and a not tasty submerged portion- ferments need to be air locked or burped, and you can't really airlock of burp a plant you are trying to grow.

There is also an alcohol problem with sweet potatoes- they like to form alcohol while fermenting. When properly cut up for pickles, sweet potatoes can produce alcohol in as little as 5-10 days. And you have to keep the jar under 65 degrees because sweet potato is particularly prone to alcohol production. A seed potato takes longer than 5-10 days with preferred temps above 65 degrees to grow viable slips that can be planted. And also, alcohol can stunt of kill plant growth. Speaking of temps, the water would have to be kept at the same temps as the seawater in that area to reflect the natural conditions- I don't know what those temps are.

I still think bison should go ahead and try his experiment. I'd be surprised if he got healthy slips to grow- but as a side result he could indeed tell us what happens to a sweet potato floating in saltwater for days.

Honestly, I think if tuberous roots were transported, it was most likely human transport rather than chance of nature floating fruit. Seed pods would be more likely to be the floating fruit if that's how the sweet potato spread from one spot to another.

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3 hours ago, rashore said:

 

Honestly, I think if tuberous roots were transported, it was most likely human transport rather than chance of nature floating fruit. Seed pods would be more likely to be the floating fruit if that's how the sweet potato spread from one spot to another.

I agree that seed pods really would be the only thing to survive, but seed pods of plants that grew near the coast or on the coast.   Fresh water does transport invasives (to use a practical example) but I can't think of many that have arrived via ocean or sea.  Overland transport by animals or humans or wind and water, yes.  Ocean, no.  One exception would be mangroves and I'm not sure that they go very far (a second exception seems to be coconuts.)  In addition you need the right kind of soil at the endpoint.

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To make a realistic test, I'll determine the orientation of the sweet potato while floating freely, and use that.  I suspect this will be with the long axis horizontal. Will place it where a temperature of about 80 degrees F. is maintained, to match tropical conditions, and let light shine on it  in a normal diurnal pattern.

Will spray it with fresh water from time to time to simulate rain, and stir the water to produce something like the effect of water movement in the ocean.

I'm speculating that if a still-alive sweet potato, arrived on a beach in Oceania, it might be planted, out of curiosity, by whoever found it.  

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 After reading from a number of sources that sweet potatoes float, and none contradicting this assertion, I didn't expect this to be a problem. In fact, I found that my specimen sunk, both in fresh water, and in seawater brine. Unless I can find a variety that floats, that's the end of that idea !

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Have now tried to float both common varieties of sweet potato, first pale yellow, and then red-orange, in saltwater. Neither floated. I had hopes for the latter, because it is described as being less firm. That suggested it might be less dense, too. If so, the difference wasn't enough to matter.

 Instead of a novel possible solution to the problem of sweet potato propagation across the Pacific Ocean, I have the basis for a couple of attractive houseplants, and a new skepticism for multi-sourced support for a supposed fact, such as the one that goes: "sweet potatoes can float in water."   

Edited by bison
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Any thought to migrating birds transporting the seeds?  Many seeds are not digested as such they just pass through and with the rest of the droppings acting as fertilizer they start to grow.  I don't know about sweet potatoes though.

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Further research-- Found a website with content by a knowledgable farmer, experienced with sweet potatoes. She reports that some sweet potatoes will float. These seems to occur at random, without regard to variety, and reported to indicate superior germinating specimens.

Having said that, the case for cultural contact between Polynesia and South America turns out to look pretty convincing, so this is very probably how the sweet potato made its way across the Pacific. 

 

Edited by bison
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1 hour ago, bison said:

Having said that, the case for cultural contact between Polynesia and South America turns out to look pretty convincing, so this is very probably how the sweet potato made its way across the Pacific. 

 

Considering the earliest sweet potato is dated about 8,000 BC in Peru and 1,000 AD in the Cook Islands I think it was carried in a canoe.

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  • 1 month later...
On 11/14/2017 at 5:30 AM, TonopahRick said:

Any thought to migrating birds transporting the seeds?  Many seeds are not digested as such they just pass through and with the rest of the droppings acting as fertilizer they start to grow.  I don't know about sweet potatoes though.

That certainly is a possibility. But there is also evidence in the form of linguistic similarities between the languages of Polynesia and certain South American Indian tribes. 

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On 11/8/2017 at 4:06 AM, bison said:

As it turns out, sweet potatoes are usually moderately sensitive to salt. Not such good news for my idea ! My hope is that floating in brine, instead of packed in soil that receives salt water will constitute a different enough set of conditions to help matters. Floating, and only being partially exposed to the brine may also help.

I've seen directions for sprouting a sweet potato in plain water, which could presumably also be applied to brine. Some use the whole tuber, some use half, cut across the short axis.   

Well, we do know that the Polynesians were adept and intrepid sailors. Their seagoing craft were more than capable of voyaging across the South Pacific, as the Polyesian settlement on Easter Island attests.

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34 minutes ago, Lord Harry said:

That certainly is a possibility. But there is also evidence in the form of linguistic similarities between the languages of Polynesia and certain South American Indian tribes. 

What if they were transported by parrots?

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4 hours ago, Oniomancer said:

What if they were transported by parrots?

Impossible. Wrong direction, for one thing.

After all, parrots are known to be pinin' for the fjords, not the South Pacific.

Harte

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8 hours ago, Lord Harry said:

That certainly is a possibility. But there is also evidence in the form of linguistic similarities between the languages of Polynesia and certain South American Indian tribes. 

Link?

No...seriously.  There are a zillion SA tribes.  Which ones have been shown to have a similar language structure to Polynesia and are they linguistic isolates or something else?

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5 hours ago, Harte said:

Impossible. Wrong direction, for one thing.

After all, parrots are known to be pinin' for the fjords, not the South Pacific.

Harte

They could grip it by it's husk.

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  • 7 months later...

It's been a while, but the Roman artifacts discovered in an undisturbed Mesoamerican context are perhaps the strongest evidence for this hypothesis.

Is anyone aware of the sea-going capability of ancient Roman ships? Have experiments similar to Thor Heyrdahl's been conducted?

Edited by Lord Harry
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1 hour ago, Lord Harry said:

It's been a while, but the Roman artifacts discovered in an undisturbed Mesoamerican context are perhaps the strongest evidence for this hypothesis.

Is anyone aware of the sea-going capability of ancient Roman ships? Have experiments similar to Thor Heyrdahl's been conducted?

I call bull poop. The Romans had too many bad things in their bodies we weren't adapted to. They would of also brought rats and invasive weeds. 

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A ship blown off course maybe. With nobody left on board.

Harte

ETA: I'd like to see some of these artifacts discovered undisturbed though.

Edited by Harte
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36 minutes ago, Harte said:

A ship blown off course maybe. With nobody left on board.

 

:tu:  

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