Pikes/Pines | Mega mammoths and giant manroots: the natural history behind your Hilloween pumpkin

Your s truly sitting on a Cucurbita maxima (Image: Brendan McGarry) Nothing says autumn like pumpkins. Jack-o-lanterns. Pumpkin pie. Pumpkin spiced lattes. Pumpkin Beer. Fields of pumpkins (and their three sisters cohort, corn, as a maze). Pumpkins are such an integral part of American culture that we don’t really have to think of them, they are just there every fall, taken for granted and left unexamined despite littering porches across Capitol Hill and the country between now and Thanksgiving. Turns out they are wonders of human/plant mutualism, formed by cultural and ecological change. These fruits that we broadly call squashes are deeply of the places we call the Americas today. Archeological evidence suggests that people living in present day Mexico and Central America were using pumpkins as a staple crop over 10,000 years ago so long ago that it feels almost foolish calling them an “American” fruit. Before people started breeding them into their present, and varied, forms, we l