Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from Asia
Written by Xiuhcoatl
Dec 13, 2005 at 05:54 PM
Note from Xiuhcoatl of Aztlan Rising: I'll let you be the judge of this one...
Public release date: 13-Dec-2005
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Contact: Steve Bradt
617-496-8070
Harvard University
Ancient humans brought bottle gourds to the Americas from Asia
Plants widely used as containers arrived, already domesticated, some 10,000 years ago
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 13, 2005 -- Thick-skinned bottle gourds widely
used as containers by prehistoric peoples were likely brought to the
Americas some 10,000 years ago by individuals who arrived from Asia,
according to a new genetic comparison of modern bottle gourds with
gourds found at archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere. The
finding solves a longstanding archaeological enigma by explaining how a
domesticated variant of a species native to Africa ended up millennia
ago in places as far removed as modern-day Florida, Kentucky, Mexico
and Peru.
The work, by a team of anthropologists and biologists from Harvard
University, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural
History, Massey University in New Zealand and the University of Maine,
appears this week on the web site of the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
Integrating genetics and archaeology, the researchers assembled a
collection of ancient remnants of bottle gourds from across the
Americas. They then identified key genetic markers from the DNA of both
the ancient gourds and their modern counterparts in Asia and Africa
before comparing the plants' genetic make-up to determine the origins
of the New World gourds.
"For 150 years, the dominant theory has been that bottle gourds, which
are quite buoyant and have no known wild progenitors in the Americas,
floated across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa and were picked up and
used as containers by people here," says Noreen Tuross, the Landon T.
Clay Professor of Scientific Archaeology in Harvard's Faculty of Arts
and Sciences. "Much to our surprise, we found that in every case the
gourds found in the Americas were a genetic match with modern gourds
found in Asia, not Africa. This suggests quite strongly that the gourds
that were used as containers in the Americas for thousands of years
before the advent of pottery were brought over from Asia."
The researchers say it's possible the domesticated gourds --
differentiated from wild bottle gourds by a much thicker rind -- were
conveyed to North America by people who arrived from Asia in boats or
who walked across an ancient land bridge between the continents, or
that the gourds floated across the Bering Strait after being
transported by humans from their native Africa to far northeastern Asia.
"This finding paints a new picture of the founding of the Americas,"
says co-author Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian Institution. "These
people did not arrive here empty-handed; they brought a domesticated
plant and dogs with them. They arrived with important tools necessary
to survive and thrive on a new continent, including some knowledge of
and experience with plant domestication."
Thought to have originated in Africa, bottle gourds (Lagenaria
sicereria) have been grown worldwide for thousands of years. The gourds
have little food value but their strong, hard-shelled fruits were long
prized as containers, musical instruments and fishing floats. This
lightweight "container crop" would have been particularly useful to
human societies before the advent of pottery and settled village life,
and was apparently domesticated thousands of years before any plant was
domesticated for food purposes.
Radiocarbon dating indicates that bottle gourds were present in the
Americas by 10,000 years ago and widespread by 8,000 years ago. Some of
the specimens studied by the team were not only the oldest bottle
gourds ever found but also quite possibly the oldest plant DNA ever
analyzed. The newest of their archaeological samples, a specimen found
in Kentucky, was just 1,000 years old -- suggesting the gourds were
used in the New World as containers for at least 9,000 years.
###
Tuross and Smith's co-authors on the PNAS paper are David L. Erickson
of the National Museum of Natural History, Andrew C. Clarke of Massey
University and Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine. Their
work was supported by the Smithsonian Institution and the National
Museum of Natural History and by Harvard's Department of Anthropology
and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
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