Early agriculture flowered in Mexico
By Bruce Bower
Beginning around 6,000 years ago, a swampy stretch of Mexico’s Gulf Coast served as a hotbed of plant domestication in the Americas, according to a new study. New World agriculture probably originated there and in other parts of what is now Mexico, conclude archaeologist Kevin O. Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research in Aquasco, Md., and his coworkers.
Their Gulf Coast discoveries, published in the May 18 Science, follow another team’s report that residents of Mexico’s southern highlands domesticated squash and maize between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago (SN: 2/17/01, p. 103).