How long have bananas have exsisted???

Question

i was trying to do a science fair project and i REALLY need help...this is summa school, BABY!!!!!

Answer 1

A long time

Answer 2

The banana is mentioned for the first time in history in 600 BC from Buddhist texts. Click on the link for more valuable info.

Answer 3

< from wikipedia>

History

Early cultivation

The domestication of bananas took place in southeastern Asia. Many species of wild bananas still occur in New Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Recent archaeological and palaeoenvironmental evidence at k*k Swamp in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea suggests that banana cultivation there goes back to at least 5000 BCE, and possibly to 8000 BCE. This would make the New Guinean highlands the place where bananas were first domesticated. It is likely that other species of wild bananas were later also domesticated elsewhere in southeastern Asia.



The banana may have been present in isolated locations of the Middle East on the eve of the rise of Islam. There is some textual evidence that the prophet Muhammad was familiar with it. The spread of Islam was followed by the far reaching diffusion of bananas. There are numerous references to it in Islamic texts (such as poems and hadiths) beginning in the ninth century. By the tenth century the banana appears in texts from Palestine and Egypt, from it diffused into north Africa and Muslim Spain. In fact, during the medieval ages, bananas from Granada were considered amongst the best in the Arab world.

Some recent discoveries of banana phytoliths in Cameroon dating to the first millennium BCE  have triggered an as yet unresolved debate about the antiquity of banana cultivation in Africa. There is linguistic evidence that bananas were already known in Madagascar around that time. The earliest evidence of banana cultivation in Africa before these recent discoveries dates to no earlier than late 6th century AD. Muslim Arabs likely brought bananas from the east coast of Africa west to the Atlantic coast and further south to Madagascar.

In 650, Islamic conquerors brought the banana to Palestine. The word banana is of West African origin, and passed into English via Spanish or Portuguese.

Plantation cultivation

In 15th and 16th century, Portuguese colonists started banana plantations in the Atlantic Islands, Brazil, and western Africa.[citation needed] As late as the Victorian Era, bananas were not widely known in Europe, although they were available via merchant trade. Jules Verne references bananas with detailed descriptions so as not to confuse readers in his book Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).

In the early 20th cenntury, bananas began forming the basis of large commercial empires, exemplarized by the United Fruit Company, which created immense banana plantation especially in Central and South America. These were usually extremely commercially exploitative, and the term "Banana republic" was coined for states like Honduras and Guatemala, representing the fact that "servile dictatorships" were created and abetted by these companies and their political backers, for example in the USA.

Answer 4

As you know them not for very long, maybe 170 years. Before the yellow banana had been bred there were other plants similar to bananas but tougher and needed cooking before you could eat them and with big seeds in them too.