Cucumbers originated in India

Earlier believed to have come to India via Afghanistan, it now turns out that cucumbers and melons were native to India all along!

Pandey and Susanne Renner of the Departments of Systematic Botany and Mycology, University of Munich, Germany, produced a checklist of the Cucurbitaceae of India that includes up-to-date information available for that family. According to Arun Pandey of the Department of Botany, Delhi University, ‘we can say with a fair degree of certainty that cucumbers originated in the Ganges region in the foothills of the Himalayas and this is where wild cucumbers seem to have first been cultivated.’