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LiveScience
LiveScience
Sascha Pare

Tomatoes randomly mated with another plant 9 million years ago. The result? Potatoes.

A greengrocers stall with potatoes and tomatoes stacked next to each other.

Random mating between wild tomato plants and potato-like species 8 million to 9 million years ago may have given rise to one of our favorite carbs: the potato.

Together with 107 extant, wild potato species, the cultivated potatoes we know today (Solanum tuberosum) belong to the lineage Petota. New research suggests that this lineage, or group of closely related species, emerged from interbreeding between the ancestors of two other lineages: Tomato, which consists of 17 living species, including the salad essential Solanum lycopersicum, and Etuberosum, which has three living species native to South America.

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