It can be traced back thousands of years, the watermelon can ~ 5,000, to be more or less exact ~ but, not surprisingly, it wasn't quite the same back then as the fruit we enjoy today. In fact, it was all but inedible, by all accounts. Like the rest of us, that thing we now call the watermelon was born in Africa (precisely where is in dispute, but watermelon seeds were found in a 5,000-year-old settlement in Libya) and, over the centuries, traveled north to the Mediterranean area and from there to Europe. Along the way, it was cultivated, selectively bred, and slowly transformed. But why was such a bitter-tasting, unattractive fruit chosen for cultivation in the first place? Harry Paris, a horticulturalist at Israel's Agricultural Research Organization, has been studying the watermelon and its history. His answer to that question has to do with how much water it has always contained. The ancient Egyptians, for example, placed watermelons in their tombs. “These Egyptian pharaohs," explains Paris, "when they died they had a
long journey ahead of them so they needed a source of water—and what
would that source of water be?”: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150821-watermelon-fruit-history-agriculture/
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