Maca: History and Traditional Use

Maca (Lepidium meyenii) is one of the very few food crops that thrives above 4,000 metres in the harsh, wind-scoured grasslands of the central Peruvian Andes. For roughly two thousand years it has been grown, eaten, and traded by the people of the high plateau around Lake Junin — first as a hardy staple food, and later valued for vitality and fertility. Its written story begins with the Spanish chroniclers of the 1500s and 1600s, runs through a long period when it was almost forgotten outside its mountain homeland, and arrives at a modern revival driven by laboratory chemistry and clinical trials. This page tells that documented history plainly, marks tradition as tradition, and is honest about where the record is firm and where it is folklore.

Table of Contents

  1. A Crop of the High Andes
  2. Archaeology and Domestication
  3. Botanical Naming and the Brassica Family
  4. The Spanish Chroniclers
  5. Traditional Use, Fertility, and Folklore
  6. Decline and Rediscovery
  7. From Mountain Root to Modern Science
  8. Tradition, Honestly Stated
  9. Research Papers and References
  10. Connections
  11. Featured Videos

A Crop of the High Andes

To understand maca's history you first have to picture where it grows. The plant is native to the puna — the cold, treeless grassland that sits on top of the central Peruvian Andes, chiefly around Lake Junin in the departments of Junin and Pasco. Authoritative reviews place its cultivation almost exclusively between roughly 4,000 and 4,500 metres (about 13,000–14,800 feet) above sea level, in a band of latitude near 11–12°S. This is a punishing place to farm: intense ultraviolet sunlight, freezing night-time temperatures, fierce winds, and thin, mineral-poor soils where most crops simply fail.

Maca survives, and even prospers, where little else will. It is a low rosette plant whose swollen, turnip-shaped underground storage organ (a fused hypocotyl-and-root) is the part that is eaten. That a nourishing, storable food could be coaxed from such ground made maca extraordinarily valuable to the communities living at that altitude — for many of them it was, in plain terms, one of the few reliable things to eat. The whole of maca's long human story flows from this single fact: it is a high-altitude survivor that fed people where the land offered almost nothing else.

Because it stores well after drying, maca was also a trade good. Highland growers are recorded exchanging it for lowland staples such as maize and other valley crops, carrying the dried roots down from the cold plateau into warmer farming country. A food that grows where nothing else does, keeps for months, and can be bartered for the things the highlands cannot produce is a food that becomes woven into a region's economy and culture — which is exactly what happened with maca.

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Archaeology and Domestication

Maca's antiquity is not merely a marketing claim — it rests on physical evidence. Archaeological work in the Lake Junin region has recovered maca remains, and the commonly cited span for evidence of its cultivation in that area runs from roughly 1700 BC to about AD 1200. Excavated dried roots from highland cave sites are reported to increase in size over time, the kind of change that points to deliberate selection and tending by people rather than simple gathering of a wild plant. In other words, the archaeological record suggests maca was being domesticated — bred, however informally, toward larger and more useful roots — over a very long period.

The major scientific review of maca's ethnobiology, by physiologist Gustavo F. Gonzales, states that the plant was cultivated for more than 2,000 years and was probably domesticated in the San Blas area of Junin (near present-day Ondores) some 1,300 to 2,000 years ago. The narrower window in that review and the broader span from the cave evidence are not in conflict: the older dates mark when humans were already using and tending the plant, while the later window marks the emergence of maca as a recognisably domesticated crop. Either way, maca belongs to the small, ancient family of Andean root crops — alongside the potato, oca, and others — that mountain peoples bred to feed themselves at altitudes most of the world's agriculture never reaches.

It is worth being precise about the limits of this evidence. The archaeological record tells us that maca was grown, stored, and selected over millennia in a specific corner of the central Andes; it does not hand us a tidy founding date or a named discoverer, and no honest account should invent one. Like every ancient crop, maca was not "invented" by any one person — it was shaped slowly by generations of highland farmers whose names were never written down.

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Botanical Naming and the Brassica Family

Maca is a member of the Brassicaceae — the cabbage and mustard family — which makes it a botanical cousin of broccoli, cauliflower, radish, watercress, and garden cress. This family relationship is not a trivial detail: it explains maca's peppery, slightly bitter raw flavour and its content of glucosinolates, the same class of sulfur compounds found throughout the cabbage family. Maca is, in the strict sense, a cruciferous root vegetable that happens to be used as a tonic, rather than an exotic "herb" in the leafy-medicinal sense.

The scientific name in general use is Lepidium meyenii. The species was formally named by the German botanist Gerhard Walpers in 1843, which is why older botanical references sometimes write the plant as Lepidium meyenii Walpers (or "Walp."). The species epithet meyenii honours Franz Meyen, an earlier German naturalist who travelled in South America. This is the kind of milestone that can be stated as fact: a documented act of formal botanical naming, with a known author and date, rather than folklore.

There is one genuine scientific dispute worth flagging honestly. In the 1990s the Peruvian biologist Gloria Chacon de Popovici argued that the cultivated maca of the Junin plateau is a distinct species, which she named Lepidium peruvianum. Most botanists have not accepted this split and continue to call cultivated maca Lepidium meyenii, though some later analyses have kept the question open. Readers will therefore see both names in the literature — L. meyenii in the great majority of sources, and L. peruvianum (often "Lepidium peruvianum Chacon") in a minority, including on some product labels. We use Lepidium meyenii here because it is the dominant scientific usage, while noting that the taxonomy is not entirely settled.

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The Spanish Chroniclers

Maca's documented written history begins after the Spanish conquest of Peru, when European chroniclers and clergymen started recording the plants and customs of the Andes. The earliest written description of maca is usually credited to the Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León, in his account published in 1553. Writing of the high country, he noted that in the Peruvian highlands — particularly in the province of Bombón, the very plateau around Lake Junin where maca is grown — the inhabitants made use of certain roots. This is the first time maca steps out of the unrecorded prehistoric past and into the written record.

About a century later, the Jesuit priest and naturalist Father Bernabé Cobo, in his great natural-history chronicle of the New World (completed in the mid-1600s, with 1653 commonly cited), is generally regarded as the first European writer to set down the name "maca" itself and to describe the plant's properties — recording that it grew in the wildest, coldest parts of the puna and served the highland people as a nourishing food. Later still, in the eighteenth century, the Spanish botanist Hipólito Ruiz, who explored Peru's flora, is noted as referring to maca's fertility-enhancing reputation. These three names — Cieza de León, Cobo, and Ruiz — are the dependable anchors of maca's early written history, and each is cited in the modern scientific review literature.

It is worth pausing on what these sources do and do not establish. They confirm that, from the mid-1500s onward, Europeans recognised maca as an important highland food crop with a reputation for nourishment and fertility. They are the reason we can speak about maca's history with confidence rather than guesswork. Many popular retellings add colourful specifics — exact tribute quantities, named conquistadors, dramatic anecdotes — that go beyond what these careful primary chronicles actually say; those embellishments are treated as tradition in the next section, not as documented fact.

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Traditional Use, Fertility, and Folklore

In its Andean homeland maca was, first and foremost, food. The dried roots were — and still are — boiled and stewed into a thick porridge, simmered in milk or water into a sweet drink, fermented into a mildly alcoholic beverage (maca chicha), and added to soups and baked dishes. Father Cobo's seventeenth-century observation that the highland people had little other "bread" than maca, while a strong statement, captures the plant's central place in the highland diet. As a starchy, protein-rich, mineral-bearing root that stored well through the long Andean winter, maca was a staple in the truest sense.

Alongside its role as food runs maca's long-standing reputation as a promoter of fertility and vitality, in both people and livestock. The fertility association is the most consistently documented strand of maca's traditional reputation — it appears in the chronicle tradition, is echoed by the eighteenth-century botanist Ruiz, and is the very reputation that modern researchers set out to test. Traditionally, it is said that highland herders fed maca to their animals to improve breeding and the survival of young at high altitude, where fertility in introduced livestock could be poor; this stockman's use is widely repeated and is consistent with the fertility theme, and we present it as well-attested tradition rather than laboratory fact.

Some of the most colourful claims, however, belong squarely to folklore. The popular story that Inca warriors were fed maca before battle to build strength — and then kept from it afterwards to protect conquered women — is frequently repeated, but it is not something the careful primary chronicles establish, and it should be read as tradition or legend rather than documented history. The same caution applies to oft-quoted colonial details such as precise tribute weights of maca demanded by the Spanish or the names of individual conquistadors who received it: these circulate widely on supplement websites but are not supported by the principal scholarly review, so we mention them only to flag them as unverified popular accounts. What can be said firmly is the simple, well-supported core: maca was an ancient, nourishing highland staple with a deep and persistent reputation for supporting fertility and vigour.

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Decline and Rediscovery

After the Spanish conquest, the agriculture of the Andes was reshaped around European crops and livestock, and many native highland foods lost ground. Maca, grown only in a small, remote, high-altitude region and difficult to cultivate anywhere else, became a local rather than a national crop — cherished by the communities of the Junin plateau but little known beyond them. It never disappeared; it persisted, generation after generation, in the same cold highlands that had always grown it. But for a long stretch it was, in effect, a forgotten food as far as the wider world was concerned, and its cultivated area is reported to have contracted significantly.

The modern chapter opens in the twentieth century. Scientific interest grew through the 1960s, and maca was rediscovered for commercial purposes around the Meseta de Bombón plateau near Lake Junin in the late 1980s, after which cultivation expanded and the first wave of laboratory and animal studies began to appear. From the 1990s and especially the 2000s, a steady stream of published research — much of it from Peruvian institutions such as the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima — brought maca to international attention, and it grew into a globally traded "superfood" and dietary supplement.

That global success has not been without cost or controversy. Surging international demand — including a well-publicised export boom to East Asian markets — has put pressure on Peru's traditional growers and raised real questions about biopiracy, the patenting of maca-derived compounds abroad, and protecting the crop as part of Peru's heritage. The arc of maca's recent history, then, is a familiar modern one: an ancient indigenous staple, long overlooked, suddenly valuable on the world market, with all the opportunity and tension that brings to the people who grew it for two thousand years.

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From Mountain Root to Modern Science

The transition from traditional food to studied botanical is where maca's history becomes a story of named, datable scientific milestones — the kind of claims that can be verified rather than merely repeated. Two strands stand out: the chemistry and the clinical trials.

On the chemistry side, the defining discovery is that maca contains a small group of compounds that, so far, have been found only in this plant. In 2002, a team led by Ilias Muhammad and Ikhlas A. Khan (with Jianping Zhao and D. Chuck Dunbar) reported in the journal Phytochemistry the isolation from maca roots of a novel alkaloid they named macaridine, together with macamides — benzylated fatty-acid amides — and related compounds. The macamides, along with the unsaturated fatty acids called macaenes, are now regarded as maca's signature constituents and are the focus of much current research into how the plant might actually work. This is a genuine, documented compound-isolation milestone, with known authors, a known year, and a peer-reviewed paper behind it.

On the clinical side, the modern era of maca research was driven substantially by the Peruvian physiologist Gustavo F. Gonzales and colleagues. Beginning around 2001–2002 they published controlled human and animal studies on maca's traditional indications — an animal study on spermatogenesis in 2001, and, notably, a 2002 double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in men reporting that maca improved self-reported sexual desire without raising serum testosterone, a result that pointed away from a simple hormonal explanation. Later independent work extended the testing into other areas: a 2008 randomised pilot study examined maca for sexual dysfunction caused by antidepressant (SSRI) medication, and a 2011 systematic review gathered the randomised trials on menopausal symptoms. These studies are discussed in detail, with their strengths and limitations, in the companion Maca Benefits articles.

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Tradition, Honestly Stated

Maca's history is unusually clean to tell honestly, because its core is well supported and its embellishments are easy to identify. The firm parts are these: maca is an ancient Brassica-family root crop, cultivated for roughly two thousand years on the high plateau around Lake Junin in central Peru; it was a vital highland food and trade good; it was first written about by Cieza de León in 1553 and named by later chroniclers and botanists; it carried a deep and consistent reputation for supporting fertility and vigour; it faded to a local crop after the conquest and was rediscovered commercially in the late twentieth century; and from 2001–2002 onward it became the subject of real chemistry and real clinical trials.

The softer parts — the warriors-before-battle legend, the exact colonial tribute figures, the named conquistadors — are tradition and popular retelling, not documented fact, and this page has flagged them as such rather than dressing them up as history. That distinction matters on a public-health site: readers deserve to know which claims rest on archaeology and primary chronicles and which rest on a good story passed from website to website.

What makes maca genuinely interesting is that its oldest, best-attested reputation — fertility and vitality — is precisely the question modern researchers chose to put to the test, and the early laboratory chemistry (macamides and macaenes found in no other plant) gives that inquiry a real chemical foothold. Tradition raised the questions; modern science is still working through the answers. For the practical, evidence-weighed picture of what maca may and may not do today — for libido, fertility, menopause, energy, and mood — see the Maca overview and the dedicated Maca Benefits deep-dive articles.

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Research Papers and References

The list below combines the key peer-reviewed scientific sources on Lepidium meyenii — including the principal ethnobotanical review (the source for most of the historical claims above) and the compound-isolation and clinical studies named in the text — with curated PubMed topic-search links into the wider literature. Historical primary texts (the chronicles of Cieza de León, Cobo, and Ruiz) are named in the article as historical sources rather than as modern citations. Each external link opens in a new tab.

  1. Gonzales GF. Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacology of Lepidium meyenii (Maca), a Plant from the Peruvian Highlands. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2012;2012:193496. — doi:10.1155/2012/193496 · PMID 21977053
  2. Muhammad I, Zhao J, Dunbar DC, Khan IA. Constituents of Lepidium meyenii ‘maca’. Phytochemistry. 2002;59(1):105-110. — doi:10.1016/S0031-9422(01)00395-8 · PMID 11754952
  3. Gonzales GF, Ruiz A, Gonzales C, Villegas L, Cordova A. Effect of Lepidium meyenii (maca) roots on spermatogenesis of male rats. Asian Journal of Andrology. 2001;3(3):231-233. — PMID 11561196
  4. Gonzales GF, Cordova A, Vega K, Chung A, Villena A, Góñez C, Castillo S. Effect of Lepidium meyenii (MACA) on sexual desire and its absent relationship with serum testosterone levels in adult healthy men. Andrologia. 2002;34(6):367-372. — doi:10.1046/j.1439-0272.2002.00519.x · PMID 12472620
  5. Lee MS, Shin BC, Yang EJ, Lim HJ, Ernst E. Maca (Lepidium meyenii) for treatment of menopausal symptoms: A systematic review. Maturitas. 2011;70(3):227-233. — doi:10.1016/j.maturitas.2011.07.017 · PMID 21840656
  6. Dording CM, Fisher L, Papakostas G, Farabaugh A, Sonawalla S, Fava M, Mischoulon D. A Double-Blind, Randomized, Pilot Dose-Finding Study of Maca Root (L. meyenii) for the Management of SSRI-Induced Sexual Dysfunction. CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics. 2008;14(3):182-191. — doi:10.1111/j.1755-5949.2008.00052.x · PMID 18801111
  7. Lepidium meyenii ethnobotany, history, and traditional use — PubMed: maca ethnobotany and traditional use
  8. Macamides and macaenes — maca phytochemistry — PubMed: maca macamides and macaenes

External Authoritative Resources

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Connections

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