133 Year Old Pumpkin

There’s a deeper evolutionary history behind jack-o-lanterns and pumpkin spice lattes than you might think.  Recent research from Penn State indicates the plant lineage might have went extinct had it not been for humans.  Species in the genus Cucurbita (including pumpkins, gourds, squashes) were domesticated by humans in eastern North America about 10,000 years ago.  That is, they were cultivated in gardens, likely first selected for the use of their durable rinds (anthropological evidence for gourds used as containers for drinking) and later as a food source.  Most Cucurbita species went extinct around this time, coinciding with the extinction of large mammals that these species relied upon to spread their seeds.  Their fruits were unpalatable to the smaller herbivores that did not go extinct. Ironically, it is human hunters, paired with climate change, that led to the extinction of large herbivores in North America.  Modern day pumpkins have adapted to the Anthropocene.

​Collected near Freedom (Beaver county, PA), this pumpkin specimen (Cucurbita pepo) was collected from Dun’s Farm in 1884 by John A. Shafer, who became the first Curator of Botany at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History a decade later.