Appearance
"E. guineensis" is monocotyledonous. Mature palms are single-stemmed and grow to 20 meters tall. The leaves are pinnate and reach 3–5 meters long. A young palm produces about 30 leaves a year. Established palms over 10 years produce about 20 leaves a year. The flowers are produced in dense clusters; each individual flower is small, with three sepals and three petals.The palm fruit takes 5–6 months to develop from pollination to maturity. It is reddish, about the size of a large plum, and grows in large bunches. Each fruit is made up of an oily, fleshy outer layer, with a single seed, also rich in oil. When ripe, each bunch of fruit weighs between 5 and 30 kg depending on the age of the palm tree.
Distribution
The species is also now naturalised in Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Central America, Cambodia, the West Indies, and several islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The closely related American oil palm "Elaeis oleifera" and a more distantly related palm, "Attalea maripa", are also used to produce palm oil."E. guineensis" was domesticated in West Africa along the south-facing Atlantic coast. There is insufficient documentation and as of 2019...hieroglyph snipped... insufficient research to make any guesses as to when this occurred. Human use of oil palms may date as far back as 5,000 years in Egypt; in the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered palm oil in a tomb at Abydos dating back to 3000 BCE.
The first Western person to describe it and bring back seeds was the French naturalist Michel Adanson.
Oil palms can produce much more oil per unit of land area than most other oil-producing plants.
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