Origins

Chilis got their start over 10,000 years ago as tiny round berries in the lowlands of Brazil. We now know that because that is where, by a very wide margin, the greatest number of wild chili variations are still to be found today.

Chilis eventually made their way out of Brazil and across the mountainous Andes to South America's western coast. They did this not so much in the seed collections of migrating tribes as in the bellies of helpful birds.

Birds seem not taste the hotness in chili peppers the way we humans do. But birds love chilis' taste nonetheless, whatever that taste is to them. So they gobble them up whenever and wherever they can.

But sometimes the younger, not-yet-ripe peppers fail to get digested in the birds' stomachs. They end up getting pooped out someplace else where the bird has flown, sometimes far away from where they had been first snapped up, comfortably wrapped in a nice package of natural fertilizer.

Scientists have established that that's how the thousands of different wild varieties of chili peppers have come to be dispersed over most of South America and up into Central America and Mexico. Even today, in small villages in South and Central America, people still sell in their town markets wild peppers they've picked in the hills around them.

Chilis move to Europe

Not all the spread of chili peppers traces back to birds, of course. These vegetables were valued a great deal by the early Native Americans, who worked to develop larger, more vigorous, and more tasty varieties.

Native Americans began growing chilis on their own (not just picking the wild ones) between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. By the time Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, Native Americans had cultivated a good number of different varieties of chili peppers. The ones they showed Columbus, however, were in the upper half of the thermometer you saw on the previous screen. At least those were the ones he was most interested in.

That fact, plus his thinking that he had found his way to India, plus the fact that he had set out looking for black pepper, led Columbus to make his big mistake in thinking that chilis were just a red version of black pepper. We tell the longer version of this story here in our profile on bell peppers; so we won't repeat it here.