Your Morning Coffee May Be 600K Years Old

That coffee you slurped this morning? It's 600,000 years old. Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world's most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as "arabica," the AP reports. The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species. "In other words, prior to any intervention from man," said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study. published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.

• These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. In the 1600s, Indian monk Baba Budan is fabled to have smuggled seven raw coffee beans back to his homeland from Yemen, laying the foundation for coffee's global takeover.
• Arabica coffee, prized for its smooth and relatively sweet flavor, now makes up 60% to 70% of the global coffee market and is brewed by brands such as Starbucks, Tim Horton's, and Dunkin. The rest is robusta, a stronger and more bitter coffee made from one of arabica's parents, Coffea canephora.
• The arabica plant's population fluctuated over thousands of years before humans began cultivating it, flourishing during warm, wet periods and suffering through dry ones. These lean times created so-called population bottlenecks, when only a small number of genetically similar plants survived. Today, that renders arabica coffee plants more vulnerable to diseases like coffee leaf rust, which cause billions of dollars in losses every year.
• Researchers from Nestlé, which owns several coffee brands, contributed to the study. The study clarifies how arabica came to be and spotlights clues that could help safeguard the crop, said Fabian Echeverria, an adviser for the Center for Coffee Research and Education at Texas A&M University who was not involved with the research.

(More coffee stories.)