February 20, 2013 at 11:19AM How the sweet potato genome tells the story of the first journeys to the Americas

The Europeans may not have been the first foreigners to set foot in the Americas. Several centuries before them, Polynesian ships apparently landed on the coast of Peru, and eventually sailed home with sweet potatoes, which are now found throughout the Pacific. This has been confirmed by a vast study by a team of scientists from the CNRS and CIRAD, published on 23 January in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

via CIRAD - Actualités / News http://www.cirad.fr/news/all-news-items/articles/2013/science/origins-of-sweet-potato-seen-through-its-genome