The Origin of the Banana Was Never What We Thought — DNA Finally Revealed The Truth

The banana in your kitchen has no seeds, cannot reproduce, and is a near perfect clone of billions of others. Even the scientists who read its entire genome still cannot tell you where it fully came from. Hidden in its DNA are the fingerprints of wild ancestors no one has ever found. What if the world's most ordinary fruit has a past we have completely lost? The textbook says two wild parents and one homeland in Southeast Asia. The DNA says at least three of the banana's ancestors are unknown, and some may already be extinct. The fruit you eat is only the second banana, a replacement for a variety that went extinct in the 1950s, and it is now facing a brand new disease that scientists have just discovered is nothing like the one that came before. How long does the banana really have left? Subscribe — new origin stories posted regularly.