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Young Dark Blonde Girl Shows Off In The Studio With A Watermelon
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History
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.
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