From: H.M. Hubey
Message: 704
Date: 2003-06-21
| Subject: | [evol-psych] Agriculture's roots get a South Pacific twist |
|---|---|
| Date: | Sat, 21 Jun 2003 08:21:08 +0100 |
| From: | Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@...> |
| Reply-To: | Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@...> |
| Organization: | http://human-nature.com |
| To: | evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com |
Science News
Week of June 21, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 25
New Guinea Went Bananas: Agriculture's roots get a South Pacific twist
Bruce Bower
Situated in the South Pacific islands, remote New Guinea seems an
unlikely place for the invention of agriculture. Yet that's precisely what
happened there nearly 7,000 years ago, according to a new investigation.
Inhabitants of this tropical outpost cultivated large quantities of
bananas about 3 millennia before the arrival of Southeast Asian seafarers, say
archaeologist Tim P. Denham of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and
his colleagues. Agriculture thus arose independently in New Guinea, the
scientists conclude in an upcoming Science.
Until now, convincing evidence for ancient agriculture came only from the
Middle East (SN: 10/28/00, p. 280), China, the eastern United States (SN:
9/20/97, p. 180), South America, and a region encompassing parts of Mexico and
Central America (SN: 5/24/97, p. 322). Reports in the 1970s that New Guinea
belonged in this group were criticized for relying on patchy remains and
uncertain dates from an excavation of a swampy highland site called Kuk.
"Only a few regions were geographically suited to become homelands of
full agricultural systems," says archaeologist Katharina Neumann of J.W. Goethe
University in Frankfurt, Germany, in a commentary accompanying the new article.
"New Guinea seems to have been one of them."
Full text
http://www.sciencenews.org/20030621/fob5.asp
News in Brain and Behavioural Sciences - Issue 99 - 16th June, 2003
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/issue99.html
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-- Mark Hubey hubeyh@... http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey