A Brief History of the Banana
From the jungles of New Guinea to the most-exported fruit on Earth.
Bananas are one of humanity’s oldest cultivated crops. Archaeological evidence from the Kuk Swamp in Papua New Guinea suggests people were cultivating bananas as early as 8,000–10,000 years ago — meaning bananas may have been domesticated before rice or wheat.
The long journey west
From New Guinea and Southeast Asia, bananas traveled with traders and migrants:
- To India and the Philippines in antiquity — Alexander the Great’s army encountered bananas in India around 327 BCE
- To Africa via Madagascar, carried by Austronesian seafarers over a thousand years ago
- To the Middle East and Mediterranean with Islamic traders — the Quran’s “tree of paradise” is sometimes interpreted as the banana
- To the Americas in the 1500s, brought by Portuguese and Spanish colonists
The banana goes big
For most of history, bananas were a local tropical food. That changed in the late 1800s when refrigerated steamships made it possible to move ripening fruit across oceans. Companies like United Fruit and Standard Fruit (today’s Chiquita and Dole) built railroads, ports, and entire company towns across Central America to feed a suddenly banana-hungry United States and Europe.
By the early 20th century, the banana — a fruit that grows nowhere near most of the people who eat it — had become one of the cheapest items in the grocery store. It remains one of the most consumed fruits on the planet, with over 100 billion eaten every year.