where does pepper come from?

I wondered today, as a I stared at the grinder of pepper, where exactly those delicious little corns came from... (luckily wikipedia knows everything!

A pepper plant:



"Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The same fruit is also used to produce white pepper, red/pink pepper, and green pepper.[2] Black pepper is native to South India (Tamil: milagu, மிளகு; Telugu: miriyam) and is extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is a small drupe five millimetres in diameter, dark red when fully mature, containing a single seed.

Dried ground pepper is one of the most common spices in European cuisine and its descendants, having been known and prized since antiquity for both its flavour and its use as a medicine. The spiciness of black pepper is due to the chemical piperine. Ground black peppercorn, usually referred to simply as "pepper", may be found on nearly every dinner table in some parts of the world, often alongside table salt."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pepper