How long has watermelon been eaten?

Well, fossils indicate that the first watermelons showed up in Southern Africa around 5,000 years ago. They came to be eaten by people enough that the Ancient Egyptians around 2,000 years ago, upon foraying up the Nile to south of the Sahara found people eating watermelons, tried it, liked it, and brought plants back, which began it being a staple food source grown agriculturally rather than gathered. From Ancient Egypt, it went to the Macedonian Empire around 600 BC and to the Roman Empire around 100 BC, from which places its consumption and farming spread throughout Europe and Asia. Watermelon was then brought to the Americas in 1629 by early European colonists settling in Massachusetts. By the mid-1600s, Native Americans throughout the Americas were farming and consuming watermelon.