<< News >> FSU anthropologist finds earliest evidence of maize farming in Mexico
Submitted by coldrum on Monday, 23 April 2007 Page Views: 1480
Pre-ColumbianA Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The analysis extends Pohl's previous work in this area and validates principles of microfossil data collection.
The results of Pohl's study, which she conducted along with Dolores R. Piperno of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama, Kevin O. Pope of Geo Arc Research and John G. Jones of Washington State University, will be published in the April 9-13 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Pohl said. "These are significant new findings that fill out knowledge of the patterns of early farming. It expands on research that ...maize spread quickly from its hearth of domestication in southwest Mexico to southeast Mexico and other tropical areas in the New World including Panama and South America."
The shift from foraging to the cultivation of food ... laid the foundation for the later development of complex society and the rise of the Olmec civilization, Pohl said.
The phytolith study also was able to confirm that the plant was, in fact, domesticated maize as opposed to a form of its ancestor, a wild grass known as teosinte.
See the publication release at Eureka Alert.
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