This article is about the tree and fruit. Avocado Hass – single and halved. It is widely cultivated for its large, fleshy fruit. The tree avocado fat content originated in the highland regions of south-central Mexico to Guatemala.
The fruit of domestic varieties has smooth, buttery, golden flesh when ripe. Depending on the variety, avocados have green, brown, purplish, or black skin, and may be pear-shaped, egg-shaped, or spherical. Commercially, the fruits are picked while immature, and ripened after harvesting. Panicles of flowers with deciduous bracts arise from new growth or the axils of leaves. The species is variable because of selection pressure by humans to produce larger, fleshier fruits with a thinner exocarp.
The earliest residents of northern coastal Peru were living in temporary camps in an ancient wetland and eating avocados, along with chilies, mollusks, sharks, birds, and sea lions. The oldest discovery of an avocado pit comes from Coxcatlan Cave, dating from around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. The native, undomesticated variety is known as a criollo, and is small, with dark black skin, and contains a large seed. It probably coevolved with extinct megafauna. The avocado tree also has a long history of cultivation in Central and South America, likely beginning as early as 5,000 BC. A water jar shaped like an avocado, dating to AD 900, was discovered in the pre-Incan city of Chan Chan. 1519 in his book, Suma De Geographia Que Trata De Todas Las Partidas Y Provincias Del Mundo.
The first written record in English of the use of the word ‘avocado’ was by Hans Sloane, who coined the term, in a 1696 index of Jamaican plants. Before 1915, the avocado was commonly referred to in California as ahuacate and in Florida as alligator pear. In 1915, the California Avocado Association introduced the then-innovative term avocado to refer to the plant. In Molina’s Nahuatl dictionary “auacatl” is given also as the translation for compañón “testicle”, and this has been taken up in popular culture where a frequent claim is that testicle was the word’s original meaning. This is not the case, as the original meaning can be reconstructed rather as “avocado” – rather the word seems to have been used in Nahuatl as a euphemism for “testicle”. In the United Kingdom the term avocado pear, applied when avocados first became commonly available in the 1960s, is sometimes used.