Your morning coffee may be more than a half million years old (apnews.com)

submitted 6 months ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/science@lemmy.world

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That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old.

Using genes from coffee plants around the world, researchers built a family tree for the world’s most popular type of coffee, known to scientists as Coffea arabica and to coffee lovers simply as “arabica.”

The researchers, hoping to learn more about the plants to better protect them from pests and climate change, found that the species emerged around 600,000 years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species.

“In other words, prior to any intervention from man,” said Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo who co-led the study.

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[-] Nacktmull@lemmy.world 48 points 6 months ago

Interesting topic but pretty stupid headline.

[-] 13esq@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

I fell for the click bait.

How many species of anything are there that aren't 100's of thousands years old?

[-] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Tons of species of bacteria are merely years or decades old

[-] 13esq@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Technically correct

[-] AmidFuror@fedia.io 31 points 6 months ago

It's OK, I'm at least 100,000 years old according to this study.

[-] tb_@lemmy.world 9 points 6 months ago

According to this *headline

[-] dwindling7373@feddit.it 6 points 6 months ago

"That coffee you slurped this morning? It’s 600,000 years old."

Nope.

[-] tb_@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

That is what the news article says, yes. The article doesn't use any quotes around that line, so I assume it isn't from the original research paper.

[-] AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 points 6 months ago

Yep. My wording wasn't great. But what I meant was "according to how this study was described in the headline."

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 15 points 6 months ago

Science shouldn’t operate on clickbait headlines like this.

[-] AmidFuror@fedia.io 3 points 6 months ago

Exactly. Science reporting is pretty awful, but in many cases the scientists enable that.

The point of my other facetious comment is that this is not how anyone, scientists included, would define the age of a particular person's coffee. Your coffee was grown and harvested recently. The species can be dated back a half million years. Conflating the plants and the species is misleading at best.

[-] TheJack@lemmy.world 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

What the actual fuck... and that too from apnews?

Now only if those "researchers" looked even further back, they would have found that ultimate building blocks of any coffee, like electrons and up & down quarks came into existence around 13.8 billion year ago (or may be ~28 billion year ago as claimed by some new research), and our universe may be a part of infinite multiverse that may have existed forever.

So wouldn't it be even bigger headline that coffee has existed forever :)