Earliest Peanut, Cotton and Squash Farming Found

Anthropologists working on the slopes of the Andes in northern Peru have discovered the earliest-known evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming dating back thousands of years. Their findings provide long-sought-after evidence that some of the early development of agriculture in the New World took place at farming settlements in the Andes—before anywhere ele in the Americas.

The research was supported by the Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Lima; the National Science Foundation; the Heinz Foundation; the University of Kentucky and Vanderbilt University, and published in the June 29, 2007, issue of ScienceDaily

It is believed among anthropologists that while the men of a settlement were out hunting and fishing, the women were busy raising crops, gardening and and eatable food

 

This discovery of farming precedes all earlier estimates by twice the age of crops in the region. According to Tom D. Dillehay, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and Professor Extraordinaire at the Universidad Austral de Chile Ñanchoc, and lead author on the publication, “Our new findings indicate that agriculture played a broader role in these sweeping developments than was previously understood.”

When Lehi reached the Land of Promise, he brought with him “seeds of every kind,” which had resulted from hundreds even thousands of years of earlier development and planting. That such a discovery does not show that their use in the New World extends back usage in the Americas, but that the seeds Lehi brought were from very old development before he came, arriving and planting.

Yet, Lehi being unknown to modern sciences, Dillehay and his research team, who made their discovery in the Ñanchoc Valley, assumed it was a development of usage limited to the New World. Now this valley is approximately two-thirds of a mile wide and running inland 37 miles from the coast. It is about 1650-feet above sea level on the lower western slopes of the Andes in northern Peru, 490 miles north along the coast from Lima—between Chiclayo and Cajamarca. Between this valley and the ocean is a low range of mountains and the Peruvian coastal desert. East of Nanchoc, the Andes rise sharply and the greater precipitation in the Andes feeds the Nanchoc River and its tributaries, permitting irrigated agriculture to flourish in the valley.

Dillehay also stated: “We believe the development of agriculture by the Ñanchoc people served as a catalyst for cultural and social changes that eventually led to intensified agriculture, institutionalized political power and new towns in the Andean highlands and along the coast thousands of years ago.” There were also small-scale irrigation canals uncovered from approximately the same period.

 Dillehay (left) and his colleagues found wild-type peanuts, squash and cotton as well as a quinoa-like grain, manioc and other tubers and fruits in the floors and hearths of buried preceramic sites, garden plots, irrigation canals, storage structures and on hoes.

Obviously, seeds found in such a manner would result from much use over time and the mixture of seeds from various locations and development. Overall, the researchers used a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry to determine the radiocarbon dates of the materials. Data gleaned from botanists, other archaeological findings and a review of the current plant community in the area suggest the specific strains of the discovered plant remains did not naturally grow in the immediate area.

“The plants we found in northern Peru did not typically grow in the wild in that area,” Dillehay said. It seems understood that the team believed they must have been domesticated elsewhere first and then brought to this valley by emigration. Dillehay continued: “The use of these domesticated plants goes along with broader cultural changes we believe existed at that time in this area, such as people staying in one place, developing irrigation and other water management techniques, creating public ceremonials, and obtaining and saving exotic artifacts.” The researchers dated the squash being older than the peanut and cotton (Gary D. Daniels, “Earliest known-evidence of peanut, cotton and squash farming found,” South American Archaeology News,” Lost Worlds, February 3, 2011).

Anthropologists say this find in Peru is definitely evidence that farming developed in parts of the Americas nearly as early as it did in the Middle East, which has been considered the birthplace of the earliest agriculture. Digging under house floors and grinding stones and in stone-lined storage bins, Dillehey uncovered the squash seeds at several places in the Ñanchoc Valley, with the excavations yielding peanut hulls and cotton fibers.

The new, more precise dating of the plant remains, some of which were collected two decades ago, are reported by Dillehey and colleagues in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The evidence at Ñanchoc, Dr. Dillehey’s team wrote, indicated that “agriculture played a more important and earlier role in the development of Andean civilization than previously understood.”

Lehi’s farming family would have known how to irrigate plants and crops

 

Of course, Lehi’s family would have known how to irrigate gardens and crops, having done so at Jerusalem before leaving the area, and continuing in the Land of Promise.

In an accompanying article on early agriculture, Eve Emshwiller, an ethnobotanist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was quoted as saying the reports of early dates for plant domestication in the New World were remarkable because the activity appeared to have occurred not long after humans first colonized the Americas.

The article also noted that cultivated squash seeds have recently been reported in Mexico, along with evidence of domesticated maize there. Scholars now think that plants were domesticated independently in at least 10 “centers of origin;” those centers, in addition to the Peru and the Middle East, include places in Africa, southern India, China and New Guinea.

In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, an arc from modern-day Israel through Syria and southeastern Turkey to Iraq, wheat and barley were domesticated, and rye may have been domesticated in the same era. Experts in ancient agriculture suspect that the transition from foraging to cultivation started much earlier than that, and was not as abrupt a transformation as the archaeological record would seem to indicate.

Botanists studying the squash, peanut and cotton remains determined that the specific strains did not grow naturally in the Ñanchoc area. The peanut, in particular, was thought to be better suited to cultivation in tropical forests and savannas elsewhere in South America. The wild ancestor of squash has yet to be identified, though lowlands in Colombia are thought to be a likely source.

So if the new research shows that the “horticultural economies in parts of the Andes took root by about 10,000 years ago,” Dr. Dillehey’s team said, it remains to be seen when and where the domestication of squash, peanuts and cotton took place.

Dr. Dillehay’s most notable previous achievement was the discovery of a campsite of hunter-gatherers at Monte Verde, in Chile, which dates to about 13,000 years ago. Most archaeologists recognize this as the earliest well-documented human occupation site uncovered so far in the New World.

Other explorations in recent years have yielded increasing evidence of settlements and organized political societies that flourished in the coastal valleys of northern Peru, possibly as early as 5,000 years ago. Until now, the record of earlier farming in the region had been sparse (this is because none matched the anthropologist’s view of what happened ad when it did).

It should be kept in mind that while scientists do not use the type of population development shown in the Book of Mormon, such information shows that in the Americas, hunters and gatherers were not part of the normal development of the peoples who lived there—after all, Lehi landed with a totally developed society, farmers, traders, businessman as the initial and oldest individual in the Land of Promise. Yet, scholars and scientists devote several decades to research on ancient cultures in South America, not realizing their common ascent.

However, initial radiocarbon dating of the plant remains from Ñanchoc was based on wood charcoal buried at the sites, but the results varied widely and were considered unreliable. More recent radiocarbon dating, with a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry, relied on measurements from undisturbed buried charcoal and an analysis of the actual plant remains.

The distribution of building structures, canals and furrowed fields, Dr. Dillehey said, indicated that the Andean culture was moving beyond cultivation limited to individual households toward an organized agricultural society.