Bottle gourds had already conquered much of the globe before 1492. Yet how they got to the Americas remained unknown. Researchers discovered via DNA analysis their pre-Columbian samples were more closely linked to African relatives than to Asian ones. Furthermore, a computer model of Atlantic Ocean currents confirmed that a bottle gourd traveling from West Africa could make it to North or South America in nine months. Yet one mystery remains: why wild bottle gourds disappeared in the Americas? Perhaps some animals that might have spread the seeds went extinct, so did wild bottle gourds.