Every French fry, gnocchi, tater tot and order of hash browns humans have eaten in the past 5,000 years can be traced back to one place in the world — northwestern Bolivia and southern Peru. A paper by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer and Assistant Project Scientist Claudia Rumold — recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of ScienceOpens a New Window. and featured in the New York TimesOpens a New Window. — shows the researchers found the earliest direct evidence for potato consumption in that region between 3,400 and 2,200 years B.C. They studied evidence from a site called Jiskairumoko, in the Western Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains of Peru. More