In this episode we'll be exploring the Seafaring people who share common origins as speakers of the Austronesian family of languages and how they brought bananas from modern day New Guinea all the way to Madagascar and maybe beyond. Once we've established how these magical fruits made their way around the world we'll explore some of the uses that people have for them. This was supposed to be one episode but the story is so long and complex that it really needs to be two so come back next week for the very dark and very bright story of how the musa family got from Africa to the Americas, how this fruit was the cause of dictatorships supported by the US in south/central America and the amazing ways in which plantains and bananas have transformed the foods of the Americas.
Here is a list of sources used in the production of the first half of this story, I'm not great at remembering to save everything, I'll occasionally get a single fact or line from a source that I might forget to include and not everything fits in the character limit of these notes. I'll work on improving this system in the interest of accountability for what I put out there but in the mean time this should be a good tool for anyone who wants to follow up on their favourite parts of the story.
http://agroforestry.net/images/pdfs/Banana-plantain-overview.pdf
http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat54/sub343/item1577.html
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/24/6635
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/658682
http://www.fao.org/3/y5102e/y5102e04.htm
https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/adap/Publications/ADAP_pubs/1994-4.pdf
https://www.indianmirror.com/culture/indian-folklore/Banana-Tree.html
https://kabiza.com/kabiza-wilderness-safaris/uganda-is-the-banana-republic-of-africa/
https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/6192732-apiti-or-tempiagba