Early Corn Found in Mexico

The earliest evidence of domesticated corn has been found in Mexico - from 7300 years ago, 1200 years earlier than thought.

"Professor Mary Pohl conducted an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, and concluded that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C....."This research expands our knowledge on the transition to agriculture in Mesoamerica," Pohl said. "These are significant new findings that fill out knowledge of the patterns of early farming. It expands on research that demonstrates that maize spread quickly from its hearth of domestication in southwest Mexico to southeast Mexico and other tropical areas in the New World including Panama and South America."

Naturally the shift from nomadism to agriculture helped to establish the sophisticated Mezoamerican civilizations in the New World, such as the Olmec civilization that predates the better known Mayans and Aztecs conquered by the Spanish. Pohl has found evidence that farmers began to cultivate their crops along coastal areas where they also had access to fish stocks. These early finds in Tabasco challenge the idea that corn was developed in semi-arid areas in the central Mexican highlands.