Chilli peppers are one of the oldest domesticated food sources in the Americas, a new international study has revealed.

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SAN FRANCISCO: Chilli peppers have been spicing up meals in the Americas for more than 6,100 years, making them one of the region's oldest domesticated food sources, a new study shows.

An international team of researchers has traced the long history of the chilli pepper by analysing starch microfossils recovered from grinding stones, sediments and charred ceramic cookware from seven archaeological sites ranging from the Bahamas to Peru.

"Until quite recently it's been assumed that the ancestors of the great highland civilisations, like the Inca and the Aztecs, were responsible for most of the cultural and agricultural advances of the region," said co-author Scott Raymond, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary in Canada.

"We now have evidence that the indigenous people from tropical, lowland areas deserve credit for the domestication of the chilli pepper."

The study, which is published this week in the U.S. journal Science, was led by Linda Perry, a research associate at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C..

Perry discovered an unknown microfossil starch grain while doing research in Venezuela, and when she compared notes with other researchers, she found that the same mysterious starch grain had been uncovered by work in the Bahamas, Panama, Ecuador and Peru.

After studying the starches of many domesticated and wild plants, Perry determined that the mystery starch was a chilli pepper.

"Before our research, there wasn't much archaeological evidence to show that prehistoric people in Central and South America were eating domesticated chilli peppers," said Deborah Pearsall, professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the U.S, a member of the research team.

"Chilli peppers don't preserve well because when you cook with them, you eat most of them; you don't have husks or shells that are thrown away and preserved. That's why we used a technique that involved analysing microscopic starch grains on cooking and grinding tools to find this new evidence."

Early Latin American peoples would have found chilli peppers, which are rich in vitamin C, to be an excellent complement to fish and starchier foods like maize, beans, yams and corn, according to the study. "It's also an excellent disguiser," said the University of Calgary's Raymond. "If something's not tasting quite right, you can always throw a few chillis in the pot."

Christopher Columbus brought the chilli pepper to Europe after his discovery of the Americas, and the fiery fruit quickly became a favoured condiment across the globe.