    
Don
hunter
Username: Don
Post Number: 479
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, July 15, 2007 - 4:04 am: |     |
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/science/29squash.html?ex=1184558400&en=e58f9499cb36c322&ei=5070
Squash Seeds Show Andean Cultivation Is 10,000 Years Old, Twice as Old as
Thought
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: June 29, 2007
Seeds of domesticated squash found by scientists on the western slopes of
the Andes in northern Peru are almost 10,000 years old, about twice the age
of previously discovered cultivated crops in the region, new, more precise
dating techniques have revealed.
Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru
(Science)The findings about Peru and recent research in Mexico,
anthropologists say, are evidence that some farming developed in parts of
the Americas nearly as early as in the Middle East, which is considered the
birthplace of the earliest agriculture.
Digging under house floors and grinding stones and in stone-lined storage
bins, the archaeologist Tom D. Dillehay of Vanderbilt University, in
Nashville, uncovered the squash seeds at several places in the Ñanchoc
Valley, near the Pacific coast about 400 miles north of Lima. The
excavations also yielded peanut hulls and cotton fibers — about 8,500 and
6,000 years old, respectively.
The new, more precise dating of the plant remains, some of which were
collected two decades ago, is being reported by Dr. Dillehay and colleagues
in today’s issue of the journal Science.
Their research also turned up traces of other domesticated plants, including
a grain, manioc and unidentified fruits, and stone hoes, furrowed garden
plots and small-scale irrigation canals from approximately the same period
of time.
The researchers concluded that these beginnings in plant domestication
“served as catalysts for rapid social changes that eventually contributed to
the development of intensified agriculture, institutionalized political
power and towns in both the Andean highlands and on the coast between 5,000
and 4,000 years ago.”
The evidence at Ñanchoc, Dr. Dillehay’s team wrote, indicated that
“agriculture played a more important and earlier role in the development of
Andean civilization than previously understood.”
In an accompanying article on early agriculture, Eve Emshwiller, an
ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was quoted as saying
that the reports of early dates for plant domestication in the New World
were remarkable because this appeared to have occurred not long after humans
colonized the Americas, now thought to be at least 13,000 years ago.
The article also noted that 10,000-year-old cultivated squash seeds had
recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated corn
there by 9,000 years ago. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated
independently in at least 10 “centers of origin,” including, in addition to
the Middle East, Mexico and Peru, places in Africa, southern India, China
and New Guinea.
In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel
through Syria and Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated by
10,000 years ago, and possibly rye by 13,000 years ago. Experts in ancient
agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation had
started much earlier and was not as abrupt a transformation as indicated in
the archaeological record.
Dr. Dillehay has devoted several decades of research to ancient cultures in
South America. His most notable previous achievement was the discovery of a
campsite of hunter-gatherers at Monte Verde, in Chile, which dates to 13,000
years ago. Most archaeologists recognize this as the earliest
well-documented human occupation site uncovered so far in the New World.
Other explorations in recent years have yielded increasing evidence of
settlements and organized political societies that flourished in the coastal
valleys of northern Peru possibly as early as 5,000 years ago. Until now,
the record of earlier farming in the region had been sparse.
Initial radiocarbon dating of the plant remains from Ñanchoc was based on
wood charcoal buried at the sites, but the results varied widely and were
considered unreliable. More recent radiocarbon dating, with a technique
called accelerator mass spectrometry, relied on measurements from
undisturbed buried charcoal and an analysis of the actual plant remains.
The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr.
Dillehay said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond
cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized
agricultural society.
Botanists studying the squash, peanut and cotton remains determined that the
specific strains did not grow naturally in the Ñanchoc area. The peanut, in
particular, was thought to be better suited to cultivation in tropical
forests and savannas elsewhere in South America.
The wild ancestor of squash has yet to be identified, though lowlands in
Colombia are thought to be a likely source
take what you want and pay for it |
People, Places, Cultures and Resources