Ancient Gourd Offers New View of Early Americans
Contact: Dan Sandweiss (207) 581-1889; David Munson (207) 581-3777
ORONO, Maine – Decades of B movies and sensationalized TV specials have helped paint a picture of North America’s first explorers that is decidedly less than flattering. Often depicted as knuckle-dragging, club-toting brutes, they fit well with the notion that that the first humans to set foot in the Americas got there by chance, wandering along behind a herd of eastbound mammoths or displaced musk oxen.
New research may finally be giving the continent’s earliest immigrants some credit, however. While Hollywood would have us believe that early man simply took a wrong turn in ancient Siberia, a unique combination of archeology and genetics has shown that the first Americans not only knew they were coming, they planned for the trip.
Working with colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution, Massey University, and Harvard University, UMaine researcher Dan Sandweiss has helped to uncover new evidence that suggests that the first groups of humans to make their way across the vast expanse of ice and snow connecting Asia to North America were not just hunter-gathers but farmers as well, who had enough forethought to bring along seeds of at least one cultivated crop.
“We discovered three pieces of bottle gourd in a 9,000-year-old fishing site in southern Peru, which is the earliest known sample of the plant in South America,” said Sandweiss. “Results of genetic testing of the seeds from our sample and others suggests that the plant was carried across from Asia by Paleo-Indians more than 10,000 years ago.”
Used by early peoples for everything from canteens to fishing floats, cultivated bottle gourds have a tough, waterproof rind that makes them very useful as a container crop. The remains of domesticated bottle gourds have been found in archeological sites around the world, but until recently the wild ancestor of the plant had not been found. Discovered in central Africa in the late 1990s, the wild plant provided researchers with much-needed genetic information that was used to test some of the earlier theories concerning how the plant became so widespread.
One of the most widely held theories for the global range of the gourd was that the buoyant fruit simply floated across the Atlantic, arriving on the eastern shores of the Americas after a long trip from Africa. Unlike that of the tougher domestic bottle gourd, the rind of the wild version proved too weak for such a trip, however, further complicating the mystery of the American gourds’ origins. Genetic testing of the oldest samples of bottle gourd seeds showed that the New World samples all descended from an Asian variety rather than African stock, making the “immigrant farmer” theory the most plausible thus far.
“The evidence suggests that bottle gourds were the earliest plant to be cultivated in the Americas – that they were bought here from Asia by people who knew how to grow them and carried the seeds with them until they got far enough south of the ice to plant them,” said Sandweiss. “It’s speculation, but is seems to be the best fit.”
The research was published in December 2005 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an article by David L. Erickson of of the National Museum of Natural History, Noreen Tuross of Harvard University, Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian Institution, Andrew C. Clarke of Massey University and Sandweiss.