Around 3,500 years ago, the people of Central America discovered something marvelous.

The cacao bean could be used to create a fermented beverage that was unlike anything they had

ever experienced.

For centuries, the cacao bean became so important in that part of the world that it was actually used as money.

Eventually the bean was taken from the Americas to Europe where it was radically transformed.

Learn more about the history of chocolate and how the sweet treat we know today

developed from something completely different on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. The history and origin of the cacao plant have been very difficult to determine because once it was domesticated it spread rapidly

through South and Central America. The current best guess that researchers have is that

the cacao plant originally came from somewhere in the Amazon Basin. The scientific name for the plant is

Theobrauma cacao. It's a large oblong fruit and inside there is a white fleshy

pulp. It's believed that the first use of the cacao plant was its consumption as a fruit.

Inside the fruit, as with pretty much all fruits, is a dark seed, which is often called a bean.

The plant was probably domesticated about 5,300 years ago, somewhere in the Amazon.

However, it spread quickly after that, which is one of the reasons why it's been so difficult to pin down the location of its origin.

The cacao plant has a rather narrow range of latitudes where it can live, about 20 degrees

north or south of the equator.

And one of the places where it thrived was Central America. About 4,000 years ago,

the Olmex civilization began cultivating cacao in the region, and about 2,500 years ago, the

Mayan civilization made a discovery that completely changed the value of the plant.

The Mayans created a drink known as Chocolatal, or rather we know it as Chocolatal, but they may have called it something else.

More on that in a bit.

And as you can probably guess, chocolatalatal is the origin of the word chocolate.

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