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Comment by setr | Hacker News Reader

I'm left fairly confused -- the crux of the article is that the original watermelon was bred out of existence into the watermelon we know and love today -- but the article also has readers pointing out that the modern watermelon existed in the same time period.[0]

Which either implies it wasn't manipulated out of existence, but rather that two variants existed and one went extinct, or it implies that the process had occurred long before the paintings occurred, and after the paintings one went extinct.

That is, with the readers' additions, this really shouldn't be an article about breeding.. but about extinct varieties of fruits?

[0] http://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv

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We still have white fleshed watermelons and all today. In the process of improving watermelon strains, different regions might have had different varieties developed, and the part red one was eventually bred into a full red one or abandoned. The part white one the particle is about isn't the "original" watermelon either. The original wild plant that was domesticated can still be found happily growing in Africa. Those look far far less like watermelons we know than what's in either of those paintings

A good comparison is the domestic cat. The domestic cat comes from the African wildcat. The two cats are genetically similar but distinguishable with the domestic cat containing a noticeably low degree of genetic diversity. The African wildcat is endangered for no other reason than being replaced in the wild by the genetically compatible domestic cat.

There's also other simple explanations. Maybe people preferred this watermelon, it was easier to grow, etc.

A similar thing is happening to salmon, due to genetic pressure from salmon farming.

Seems to me to have been a mistake or rather a wonderful display of the problems with not properly researching something before you write about it.

The "watermelon" in the image seems not to be a watermelon at all, but rather some other type of fruit.

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