Young Blonde Girl On The Beach Eating A Watermelon

Watermelon is thought to have originated in southern Africa, where it is found growing wild, because it reaches maximum genetic diversity there, resulting in sweet, bland and bitter forms. Alphonse de Candolle, in 1882, already considered the evidence sufficient to prove that watermelon was indigenous to tropical Africa. Though Citrullus colocynthis is ten considered to be a wild ancestor watermelon and is now found native in north and west Africa, Fenny Dane and Jiarong Liu suggest on the basis chloroplast DNA investigations that the cultivated and wild watermelon appear to have diverged independently from a common ancestor, possibly C. ecirrhosus from Namibia.
It is not known when the plant was first cultivated, but Zohary and Hopf note evidence its cultivation in the Nile Valley from at least as early as the second millennium BC. Although watermelon is not depicted in any Egyptian hieroglyphic text nor does any ancient writer mention it, finds the characteristically large seed are reported in Twelfth dynasty sites; numerous watermelon seeds were recovered from the tomb Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
By the 10th century AD, watermelons were being cultivated in China, which is today the world's single largest watermelon producer. By the 13th century, Moorish invaders had introduced the fruit to Europe; according to John Mariani's The Dictionary American Food and Drink, "watermelon" made its first appearance in an English dictionary in 1615.
Museums Online South Africa list watermelons as having been introduced to Native Americans in the 16th century. Early French explorers found Native Americans cultivating the fruit in the Mississippi Valley. Many sources list the watermelon as being introduced in Massachusetts as early as 1629. Southern food historian John Egerton has said he believes African slaves helped introduce the watermelon to the United States. Texas Agricultural Extension horticulturalist Jerry Parsons lists African slaves and European colonists as having distributed watermelons to many areas the world. Parsons also mentions the crop being farmed by Native Americans in Florida (by 1664) and the Colorado River area (by 1799). Other early watermelon sightings include the Midwestern states (1673), Connecticut (1747) and the Illiana region (1822).