Around 8 million years ago, an ancestor of modern tomatoes in South America hydridised with a plant called Etuberosum, and this reshuffling of genes gave rise to the potato

We’ve finally solved the mystery of where potatoes came from,” Sanwen Huang of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China, said in a statement. As it turns out, the more than 4,000 species of modern-day potatoes are the result of crossbreeding between wild tomato plants and potato-like species in South America some nine million years ago.