Mondo Knows Facts
Apples descend from Tian Shan forests
The wild ancestor of the orchard apple still grows in Central Asia Malus sieversii, the wild apple of the Tian Shan mountains on the China and Kazakhstan border, is the main ancestor of domesticated apples. Its fruit varies wildly in size and flavour, and some trees bear the large sweet forms that farmers later selected. The city of Almaty takes its name from a Kazakh word meaning place of apples. It sits in Mondo's food collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: apple, central-asia, orchards
Apples descend from Tian Shan forests: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The wild ancestor of the orchard apple still grows in Central Asia. The figure is taken from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a food fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Food shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.