When the Spanish conquistadores reached Central America, they were intrigued by the gum-chewing of the Aztec prostitutes (who wore yellow cream on their faces, red cochineal dye on their teeth, and plied their trade on street corners). What they were actually chewing was chicle, a milky liquid sap that oozes from cuts in the wild sapodilla tree (Manilkara zapota), and which turns into a harder gum as it dries.
Chicle had been a sacred substance for the Mayan civilization centuries earlier. Their heroic snake deity Kulkulan (also known as the ‘Feathered Serpent’) was depicted chewing it in folk tales. However, after the Spanish subjugated the Aztecs, the trade routes from the forests to the cities collapsed and chicle chewing was only preserved in the forest areas.
The chewing of tree resin was also practised in other parts of the world. In North America, Europeans picked up the habit of chewing spruce resin from the Native American peoples, and this was the inspiration for the first commercially produced chewing gums. In 1848, John B. Curtis created ‘The State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum’, and in 1850 another gum based on paraffin wax sweetened with powdered sugar came on to the market. Further patents and adaptations soon followed – including a flavoured chewing gum that went on sale in the 1860s (manufactured by John Colgan, a Kentucky pharmacist), which was derived from the same chicle chewed centuries earlier by the Aztecs and Mayans. One of the minor ironies of history is that it was surviving Mayan Indians, hunting for sapodilla trees in the jungle because of the growing demand for gum in the United States, who stumbled on the now-famous ruins of many of the ancient Mayan cities.
However, for the origins of chewing gum, we have to delve much further back through time. The habit of chewing naturally occurring substances (for antiseptic, medicinal or recreational purposes) seems to go back to the Neolithic period, and to have sprung up independently in many different cultures. The ancient Greeks chewed parts of the mastic tree including the dried sap and bark, the Chinese chewed ginseng roots, the betel nut was chewed across South Asia, and both coca leaves and tobacco leaves were chewed long before people knew how to refine them into cocaine and cigarettes.
So it is hard to say when and where chewing gum truly originated. The ancient inhabitants of Scandinavia are the current claimants to the disputed title of the inventors of chewing gum – the oldest authenticated example is a 6,000-year-old piece of gum made from birch tar, which was found with tooth imprints in Kierikki in Finland.