Please correct any of the several following errors:

1. Tomatoes in the New World only.

2. Used in South America widely throughout the various cultures there. Not
widely used in North America

3. Exported to Europe in the 16th (?) Century, spreads to Asia (and Africa?)
along Colonial lines.

4. Is currently very popular worldwide.

This brings up a few questions:

1. A great number of lines on this newsgroup have been dedicated to a debate
over the role of the tomato in Italian cooking. While staying out of that
debate, nobody can deny the tomato is an honored and frequent companion to
pasta. By conservative estimates (again, unconfirmed; I'm sadly without any
access to sources beyond popular television shows), pasta has been in Italy
since the twelfth century. What was going on the pasta for those four
hundred years? Of course, I know the answer, sort of. My favorite pasta
sauce is tomato-less: a simple aglio-olio (garlic-and-oil) with, of late,
two anchovy fillets dissolved. Certainly there were other sauces?

2. Given the bio-engineering skills of the Mayans, seeing the improvements
they made to maise, one wonders what the tomatoes might have looked like
when the ancient South Americans found them.