inhabitants of eastern North America extended the range of the pawpaw, probably to the limits of its hardiness in the north and the limits of its drought tolerance in the west. In spreading the pawpaw, they would have acted as incidental domesticators, and may have exerted some selection in the direction of superior fruit quality.
Early North Americans made the first improvements in the pawpaw, by selecting intentionally or nonintentionally superior fruiting characteristics, and thereby established the genetic base upon which modern advances have been made. In the process of clearing forest for field agriculture, native North Americans preserved valuable trees, including pawpaw (Yarnell, pers. comm.). In of itself, preservation would not modify gene frequencies. However, preservation and protection in combination with the harvest of pawpaw bark for fiber could have exercised selection. The harvest of pawpaw fiber entails stripping the inner bark from the trunk of the tree, thereby killing the tree above ground, and stimulating the roots to recover by suckering. The entire plant may not die, but it is greatly weakened and is susceptible to infection. If men and women harvested bark extensively, frequently, and in discriminating fashion, sparing those three's whose fruit or yield was superior, then the harvest of pawpaw fiber could have imposed considerable pressure towards the selection of superior fruiting characteristics. Regression analysis of pawpaw seed dimensions from seeds recovered in archeological digs shows no evidence of fruit selection (Richard Ford, pers. comm.); however, many fruit and yield characteristics will not be correlated with seed dimensions, and the question remains unresolved.
The preponderance of evidence suggests that if pawpaw selection occurred as part (or consequence) of cultural activity by native Americans, then it was accomplished by peoples who lived in the valleys of the lower Ohio River and its major tributaries. It is from that region of the Midwest that the majority of pawpaw cultivars have originated. Other areas that gave rise to numbers of cultivars are Arkansas and eastern Kansas-western Missouri. There are, of course, alternative plausible explanations for the Midwestern U.S.A. origin of pawpaw cultivars. It may be an artifact of non-random exploration and reporting; in the period 1860 to 1960, the years during which most cultivars were selected, the Midwest was more literate, better educated, more active in national organizations, and more interested in scientific agriculture than was the South.
At the time of European contact, the native American societies of what is now the southeastern U.S.A. were large, with well-developed agricultures and permanent fortified settlements and religious complexes. In 1541, the De Soto expedition traversed the region from Florida, the Carolinas, west to the Mississippi River, and encountered pawpaws being grown by the native peoples throughout much of the region (Pickering, 1879). English colonization of eastern North America and the westward expansion of the young United States was initially a setback for the incipient domestication of the pawpaw. Many stands of pawpaw were destroyed in the process of
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