They've pieced the story together using quite different strands of information, including the genomes of wild and cultivated bananas, the microscopic relics of banana leaf material found at archaeological sites, and even the word for "banana" in different languages.ġ. Some scientists, in fact, have made a whole study of banana domestication and movement around the world. When a double-chromosome pollen combined with a single-chromosome egg (or vice versa), the result was a hopelessly sterile plant with even more vigorous fruit.Įvents like this happened more than once and sometimes included other types of ancestral banana species. Every now and again, the few viable eggs and pollen that they made would mistakenly contain two sets of chromosomes instead of just one. Then (for most bananas, including the Cavendish) came another chance event that caused the hybrids to end up with three sets of chromosomes.
There are whole sets of DNA repeats that plants normally have but bananas do not.