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<< Text Pages >> Xihuatoxtla - Cave or Rock Shelter in Mexico in Mexico Other

Submitted by bat400 on Sunday, 30 May 2010  Page Views: 9791

Natural PlacesSite Name: Xihuatoxtla
Country: Mexico
NOTE: This site is 95.58 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: Mexico Other Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
 Nearest Village: Tlaxmalac, Guerrero
Latitude: 18.370000N  Longitude: 99.4W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3
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Rock Shelter in Rio Balsas valley, Guerrero, Mexico.
Rockshelter formed in the area beneath an immense boulder. Evidence of occupation (grinding tools, knapped blades) dating 8900 to 8600 years ago. Noteworthy for starch grain and phytolith evidence indicating very early dates for domesticated maize and squash.

Note: Mexico's Rio Balsas Valley probable home to maize domestication from teosinte grass.
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 49.4km NNE 13° Xochicalco* Ancient Village or Settlement
 65.1km NNE 17° Cuernavaca - Piramide de Teopanzolco* Pyramid / Mastaba
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 106.2km NNE 12° Cuicuilco* Pyramid / Mastaba
 108.2km SSE 164° Grottos of Juxtlahuaca Cave or Rock Shelter
 119.6km N 11° Museo Nacional de Antropología* Museum
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 157.0km NNE 22° Teotihuacan - Temple of Quetzalcoatl* Pyramid / Mastaba
 157.5km NNE 21° Teotihuacan - Tetitla Ancient Village or Settlement
 157.8km NNE 21° Teotihuacan - Atelelco* Ancient Palace
 158.2km NNE 21° Teotihuacan* Ancient Village or Settlement
 158.2km NNE 22° Teotihuacan - Pyramid of the Sun* Pyramid / Mastaba
 159.0km NNE 21° Teotihuacan - Pyramid of the Moon* Pyramid / Mastaba
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"Xihuatoxtla" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Re: Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years by Anonymous on Sunday, 11 September 2022
Thank you. This is very interesting as I research this domesticated plant we have been eating for many years. I am from Guerrero and just now learning the origins of corn isn't far from my family origins! Thank you! Gracias- YG
[ Reply to This ]

Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years by bat400 on Sunday, 30 May 2010
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It is now growing season across the Corn Belt of the United States. Civilization owes much to this plant, and to the early people who first cultivated it. Native Americans alone domesticated nine of the most important food crops in the world, including corn, more properly called maize (Zea mays), which now provides about 21 percent of human nutrition across the globe.

But despite its abundance and importance, the biological origin of maize has been a long-running mystery. The bright yellow treat we know so well does not grow in the wild anywhere on the planet, so its ancestry was not at all obvious.

A few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century found evidence that they believed linked maize to a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte. Looking at the skinny ears of teosinte, with just a dozen kernels wrapped inside a stone-hard casing, it is hard to see how they could be the forerunners of corn cobs with their many rows of juicy, naked kernels.

But George W. Beadle, in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes. Moreover, he made fertile hybrids between maize and teosinte that looked like intermediates between the two plants. His theory still remained in doubt three decades after he proposed it. So, after he formally retired, Dr. Beadle crossed maize and teosinte, then crossed the hybrids, and grew 50,000 plants. He obtained plants that resembled teosinte and maize at a frequency that indicated that just four or five genes controlled the major differences between the two plants.

But to pinpoint the geographic origins of maize, more definitive forensic techniques were needed. This was DNA typing, exactly the same technology used by the courts to determine paternity.

In order to trace maize’s paternity, botanists led by my colleague John Doebley of the University of Wisconsin rounded up more than 60 samples of teosinte from across its entire geographic range in the Western Hemisphere and compared their DNA profile with all varieties of maize. They discovered that all maize was genetically most similar to a teosinte type from the tropical Central Balsas River Valley of southern Mexico, suggesting that this region was the “cradle” of maize evolution. Furthermore, by calculating the genetic distance between modern maize and Balsas teosinte, they estimated that domestication occurred about 9,000 years ago. Researchers led by Anthony Ranere of Temple University and Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History excavated caves and rock shelters in the region, searching for tools used by their inhabitants, maize starch grains and other microscopic evidence of maize.

In the Xihuatoxtla shelter, they discovered an array of stone milling tools with maize residue on them. The oldest tools were found in a layer of deposits that were 8,700 years old. This is the earliest physical evidence of maize use obtained to date, and it coincides very nicely with the time frame of maize domestication estimated from DNA analysis.

The most impressive aspect of the maize story is what it tells us about the capabilities of agriculturalists 9,000 years ago. These people were living in small groups and shifting their settlements seasonally. Yet they were able to transform a grass with many inconvenient, unwanted features into a high-yielding, easily harvested food crop.

For more, see the New York Times and the original papers on the finds: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and also from PNAS.
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