Sunflower Cultivation May Have Begun in Mexico

By Jill ElishMay 2001

SUNFLOWER CULTIVATION MAY HAVE BEGUN IN MEXICO, FSU PROF SAYS

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.--New archaeological discoveries by a Florida State University anthropologist suggest that ancient farmers in Mexico may have been the first to grow sunflowers as a crop.

Professor Mary Pohl said the discovery of a seed and a fruit indicate the domesticated sunflower was present in Mexico by 2500 B.C. Sunflowers were previously thought to have been domesticated in the eastern United States. The results of the find are published in the May 18 issue of Science magazine.

"This evidence supports the characterization of Mexico as a hearth for New World domestication," said Pohl, who collaborated on the study with Kevin Pope of Geo Arc Research and David Lentz of the New York Botanical Garden. The research in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.

"The sunflower data call into question the idea that there was a separate center of domestication in the eastern United States," she said. "The domestic sunflower now appears to have been a plant that was diffused over a long distance, reaching eastern North America by about 1300 B.C."

The implications of the early find of sunflower in Mexico are supported by molecular studies conducted previously by other scholars. Several tests failed to identify wild populations of sunflower in the United States as the ancestor of domesticated sunflower. The studies did indicate that sunflower came from a restricted gene pool, pointing to a single domestication event. Pohl, Lentz, and Pope believe that the ancestor population of cultivated sunflower was in Mexico. Today, sunflower is one of the world's premier oil crops with an annual global production of over 26 million metric tons.

The excavation team found even earlier evidence for cultivation of a number of crops that solidify the characterization of Mexico as a center for domestication. Using core sampling and excavation, Pohl and six other researchers on the project found traces of pollen from primitive maize and evidence of forest clearing dating to 5100 B.C.

"We're looking at the earliest cultivation of maize in Mexico," Pohl said. "This was a very significant change in lifestyle going from foraging to cultivation of food. The shift in the economic base laid the foundation for the subsequent rise of civilization here about 1300 B.C, the Olmec civilization, which predated the better known Maya by nearly 1000 years."

The sediment in which the maize pollen is found is well stratified and securely dated by a number of radiocarbon dates, Pohl said. The discovery is significant because it confirms that the cultivation of maize in the "New World" of the Americas began earlier than scholars previously thought.

Primitive maize, the ancestor of modern corn, was probably domesticated from a wild grass known as teosinte and transported to the Gulf Coast lowlands where it was cultivated, Pohl said. Traces of charcoal in the soil indicate the ancient farmers used fire to clear fields on beach ridges to grow the crops.

The discovery of cultivated maize in Tabasco, a tropical lowland area of Mexico, challenges previously held ideas that Mesoamerican farming, originated in the semi-arid highlands of Mexico. It also shows the early exchange of food plants.

"They're picking up maize and manioc (a root plant) and sunflowers and taking an active role in the transition from foraging to farming -- especially when you look at the long distances between Tabasco, Mexico, and where these plants originated," Pohl said. "That's what we have to learn more about."

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