Comment on Which came first: the kidney bean or the kidney body part?
TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone 17 hours agoTo save y’all a click, the organ came first, sometime in the 14th century, as a mix of the words for womb and egg. It wasn’t until the 16th century that we see the first recorded use of kidney bean, so the name of the bean references the shape of the organ.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
That’s a pretty solid answer from one perspective. However that still leaves me wondering what the answer would be from an evolutionary perspective. Did early sea creatures already have kidneys?
usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Looks like kidneys in vertebrates have been around for close to 400 million years, while legumes only 60 million
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
🫡
onslaught545@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Kidney beans are thought to have originated about 8000 years ago, so the organ is definitely older.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Wow! By several orders of magnitude too. I knew plants came later, but this is a pretty extreme example.