The sweet potato and the Manila galleon: the camote line

Sweet potato left the Americas three separate times and genetics can tell the lines apart: a pre-Columbian Polynesian crossing, dated in southern New Zealand to 1430-1460 CE; a Portuguese line west from the Caribbean to Africa, India and the Moluccas; and the camote line, Mexican clones carried into Asia on the Acapulco-Manila galleons. The Spanish leg is a hypothesis stated in conditional verbs by the geneticists who proposed it, and this object keeps it in those terms.