Your morning coffee may be hundreds of thousands of years old

The coffee that picked you up this morning is 600,000 years old. Researchers have found that the world's most popular type of coffee, known as arabica, emerged hundreds of thousands of years ago through natural crossbreeding of two other coffee species. Using genes from coffee plants around the world, scientists built a coffee plant family tree to better understand where it came from and how to better protect it from disease and climate change. These wild coffee plants originated in Ethiopia but are thought to have been first roasted and brewed primarily in Yemen starting in the 1400s. The research was published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics.