Phytolith evidence for Early Holocene Cucurbita

Cucurbita (squash and gourd) phytoliths recovered from two early Holocene archaeological sites in southwestern Ecuador and directly dated to 10,130 to 9320 carbon-14 years before the present (about 12,000 to 10,000 cal-endar years ago) are identified as derived from domesticated plants because they are considerably larger than those from modern wild taxa. The be-ginnings of plant husbandry appear to have been preceded by the exploi-tation of a wild species of Cucurbita during the terminal Pleistocene. These data provide evidence for an independent emergence of plant food pro-duction in lowland South America that was contemporaneous with or slight-ly before that in highland Mesoamerica. The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was one of the most important economic and social passages of human pre-history, and the topic has long been a focus of archaeological research. Studies in dry high-land regions of Mesoamerica show that plant domestication had occurred by 9000 years before the present (yr B.P.) (about 10,000 calendar years ago) (1, 2). However, empiri-cal research in the lowland Neotropics, long hypothesized to have been another indepen-dent center of agricultural origins (3), has been impeded by the poor preservation of plant remains. Here we describe early plant domestication in Ecuador using an analysis of phytoliths: microscopic siliceous remains of plants that survive in humid environments over long periods of time (4)