Sunflowers
Wild sunflowers
Sunflowers grew wild all over North
America, and from the Paleo-Indian
time on, many different groups of people picked sunflowers and ate the
little seeds, which are a good source of fat. People
who live by hunting and gathering
always need more fat to eat, because wild animals and fish
have very little fat. Either they just ate the seeds, or they ground them up into flour
and mixed the flour with water to bake a flat bread, like pita bread.
By about 3000-2000 BC, in the Late
Archaic period, people in south-western North America (modern Mexico)
began to farm sunflowers (grew them on purpose) and were encouraging
the flowers to evolve bigger and bigger seeds, and more of them. About the
same time, people like the Cherokee
along the East Coast of North America also independently began to farm sunflowers.
This picture shows a domesticated (farmed) sunflower,
with a bigger middle than the wild ones, and bigger seeds. Sunflowers, like
olives in Ancient
Greece and West Asia and North
Africa, became an important food for people in North America, because
of the fat they provided. Further south, in southern
Mexico, the Aztecs
also ate a lot of sunflower seeds, and at Aztec temples to the Sun the priestesses
wore crowns made of sunflowers.
When the European
invaders came to North America and South America in the 1500's AD,
people showed them how to grow sunflowers too. Spanish explorers brought
sunflower seeds back to Europe with them, where people grew them mainly
for decoration. But by the 1830's people were farming sunflowers in Russia
for their oil, and then Russian people moving to the United States and Canada
in the 1900's brought sunflower seeds back with them. In the 1930's, the Canadian government
encouraged farmers to
grow more sunflowers for food in Canada, and by the 1970's this
idea spread south into the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas.
Wild sunflowers still grow all over North America today. You may
know them as Black-eyed Susans.
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