They may be thought of as quintessentially English, but many of the apples that grow in British gardens, such as the Cox's Orange Pippin and the Discovery may have originated in central Asia, scientists claim.

A team of researchers from Oxford University has found that the DNA of English apples is nearly identical to that of apples growing in the Tian Shan forest on the border of Kyrgyzstan and China.

The team, led by Barrie Juniper, had assumed the English apple was a hybrid of different types of fruit including the crab apple, but discovered that they were direct descendants of fruit trees growing in the mountainous region.

Mr Juniper told the Telegraph: "The extraordinary sweet apple seems to have come directly out of the Tian Shan and much of the diversity you find in English apples is already there.

"You can have a day's march through the Tian Shan and find a range of different trees. You can pluck out big, red apples that are very similar to those you would find in the supermarkets and others that have the bitter characteristics of our cider apples."

Mr Juniper, who has written a book on the subject, believes that the apples reached Europe in the dung of domesticated horses from central Asia that fed on the fruit. Horses are thought to have been originally domesticated at Tian Shan and used on trade routes to Europe before the fruit reached Britain in around 2000BC.