The origin of grapevines is a tangled vine itself

According to the Bible, Noah was the first man to make wine. He was also, not unrelatedly, the first man to drink to excess, be found naked in his own vineyard, and wake up with a hangover. But, certain colourful details aside, this legend of the most premier of crus is not too far off the standard picture of the birth of viticulture: a single domestication that happened thousands of years in the past.

But how many thousands? Most domestications of Old World crops and animals are thought to have taken place during a white-hot period of innovation between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Grapes were a notable exception. Small-scale genetic analyses had pegged their cultivation as happening between 15,000 and 400,000 years ago—a range implausibly wide, not least because, a few minor excursions aside, Homo sapiens left Africa only about 60,000 years before the present day.