Nature
Where does Sugarcane come from?
Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea. Austronesian voyagers spread it across the Pacific and west to India, where Alexander's admiral Nearchus marvelled at “reeds that produce honey without bees”.
More Animals & plants
Nature
Pearl millet
📍 Western Sahel (northern Mali)
Pearl millet was first farmed on the southern edge of the Sahara, around today's northern Mali, more than 4,000 years ago. It later spread to India, which now grows more of it than any other country.
Nature
European rabbit
📍 Iberia & southwestern France
Rabbits are Iberian natives: the oldest fossils of the species, 600,000 years old, come from southern Spain. Australia's rabbit plague began with just 24 rabbits released in Victoria in 1859.
Nature
Budgerigar (budgie)
📍 Inland Australia
Wild budgies live across the dry interior of Australia, and every wild one is green and yellow. The blue, white and yellow pets are colour forms bred in captivity, where budgies have been raised since the 1850s.
More from Oceania
Invention
Ukulele
📍 Honolulu, Hawaii
Madeiran craftsmen who sailed to Hawaii in 1879 turned their little machete guitar into the ukulele in the 1880s, and King Kalākaua made it a royal favourite. The Hawaiian name roughly means 'jumping flea'.
Invention
Didgeridoo
📍 Arnhem Land, Australia
Aboriginal peoples of northern Australia, probably in Arnhem Land, developed it centuries before Europeans arrived. The name 'didgeridoo' isn't Aboriginal; it's an imitative English word first printed in 1908.
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Word
Taboo (the word)
📍 Tonga
Captain Cook picked up 'taboo' in Tonga in 1777, when Tongan nobles he'd invited to dinner wouldn't eat because they were taboo: forbidden. Similar words exist across Polynesia, like Hawaiian kapu.