Short answers, pulled from the story.
The apple originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor Malus sieversii still grows in the mountains of southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and northwestern China. Cultivation most likely began on the forested flanks of the Tian Shan mountains, between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Apples are grafted because seedlings do not breed true; they are extreme heterozygotes, each one different from its parents and from one another. To keep a cultivar's characteristics, growers clone it by grafting cuttings onto rootstocks, which also control tree size, hardiness, and disease resistance.
There are more than 7,500 known cultivars of apples. The UK's National Fruit Collection in Kent includes over 2,000 apple cultivars, and different varieties are bred for eating fresh, cooking, and cider production.
The apple genome was first sequenced in 2010, based on the diploid cultivar 'Golden Delicious'. That first whole genome sequence contained several errors due to the high heterozygosity of diploid apples combined with an ancient genome duplication.
Apple seeds contain small amounts of amygdalin, a cyanogenic glycoside that combines sugar and cyanide. Ingesting small amounts causes no ill effects, and the U.S. National Library of Medicine's Hazardous Substances Data Bank records no cases of amygdalin poisoning from consuming apple seeds.
The forbidden fruit of Eden is not identified in the Book of Genesis, but Christian tradition came to picture it as an apple through wordplay between the Latin malum, meaning an apple, and malum, meaning an evil. The notion that the fruit stuck in Adam's throat gave the human larynx the name Adam's apple.
World production of apples in 2023 was 97 million tonnes, with China producing 51 percent of the total. The next largest producers were the United States, Turkey, and Poland.