Cacao out of the Americas: an Amazonian tree, a Mesoamerican currency, and the price of the first chocolate boom

Archaeogenomics has moved cacao's homeland: the tree originated in the upper Amazon and was already being carried and crossed across South America five thousand years ago, so Mesoamerica received it rather than gave it. What Mesoamerica made of it was money, reckoned in cargas of twenty-four thousand beans; what the Spanish Atlantic added was a hot drink, a European market, and a price rise a Franciscan blamed on the emptying of the growing country.