by Playfuls Staff |
20th February 2007
A Canadian scientist says tools used in Panama 3,000 to 7,800 years ago suggest people were engaged in [more] agriculture much earlier than thought.
Ruth Dickau and colleagues at the University of Calgary determined ancient Panamanians were processing domesticated species of plants such as maize and arrowroot at least 7,800 years ago.
"These results add to the growing evidence that the earliest beginnings of farming were not centered in arid highland regions like central Mexico and the Peruvian Andes as once believed, but in the lowland areas and humid forests of the American tropics," Dickau said.
"What is particularly interesting is that these crops were originally domesticated outside of Panama; maize was domesticated in Mexico, and manioc and arrowroot in South America," she said. "Panama, as a relatively narrow land-bridge between the two American continents, was an important route for the human spread of food crops, and clearly a region where agriculture was practiced very early in history."
Dickau's research -- in collaboration with Anthony Ranere of Temple University and Richard Cooke of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama -- appears in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
© 2007 UPI
