That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old.
Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world’s most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as “arabica.”
The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species.
“In other words, prior to any intervention from man,” said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study.
Interesting topic but pretty stupid headline.
I fell for the click bait.
How many species of anything are there that aren’t 100’s of thousands years old?
Tons of species of bacteria are merely years or decades old
Technically correct
It’s OK, I’m at least 100,000 years old according to this study.
According to this *headline
“That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old.”
Nope.
That is what the news article says, yes. The article doesn’t use any quotes around that line, so I assume it isn’t from the original research paper.
Yep. My wording wasn’t great. But what I meant was “according to how this study was described in the headline.”
Science shouldn’t operate on clickbait headlines like this.
Exactly. Science reporting is pretty awful, but in many cases the scientists enable that.
The point of my other facetious comment is that this is not how anyone, scientists included, would define the age of a particular person’s coffee. Your coffee was grown and harvested recently. The species can be dated back a half million years. Conflating the plants and the species is misleading at best.
What the actual fuck… and that too from apnews?
Now only if those “researchers” looked even further back, they would have found that ultimate building blocks of any coffee, like electrons and up & down quarks came into existence around 13.8 billion year ago (or may be ~28 billion year ago as claimed by some new research), and our universe may be a part of infinite multiverse that may have existed forever.
So wouldn’t it be even bigger headline that coffee has existed forever :)
I thought it tasted funny.
My coffee this morning was brewed fresh and was delicious, thankyouverymuch.
half million years old
🙄
