“You'd think all kiwis would be related, sharing brown fuzz and being associated with New Zealand, but actually the kiwi fruit and kiwi bird diverged 1.4 billion years ago.”
Haha, same here! I ended up diving into a kiwi fruit rabbit hole. Apparently, the kiwi fruit was originally called the Chinese gooseberry but was rebranded by New Zealand fruit breeders as part of a marketing strategy. It’s funny looking at this picture:
Now that's cultural appropriation! Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!
> Thousands of years of domestication and breeding by Chinese fruit growers, and then New Zealand takes all the credit!
The kiwi does seem to have been domesticated by the Chinese, but you wouldn't want to infer that from the name "Chinese gooseberry". They could be like the Norwegian rat (also from China) or the "Persian" peach, prunus persica (which is from China too).
Maybe you should just assume that everything comes from China.
