botany
Small Bits of Evidence Lead to Big Find
Some mysteries can be solved if you just know what you're looking for — and where to find it.
The July 2 edition of the journal Science features a profile on reseacher Dolores Piperno, who perfected microscopic methods to trace the earliest evidence of corn among early peoples of in southern Mexico. Rather than focusing on the plant evidence of corn cobs, which put the date of the earliest domestication of corn at about 6,200 years ago, Piperno and her team looked for tiny bits of evidence among tools that might have used with corn.
Piperno, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and its Tropical Research Institute, and her team found grinding stones with traces of corn that dated to 8,700 years ago in the Balsas River Valley. This helped end a long debate about whether maize had been domesticated in the highlands or the lowlands, Science reported. Her techniques, while greeted with skepticism at first, were accepted by others in the field of archaeobiology.
Quoted the publication:
"That's exactly how you're supposed to do science," says archaeobotanist Deborah Pearsall of the University of Missouri, Columbia. "If you look at the corpus of Dolores's work, you see the power of a scientist who chooses her research topics on the basis of hypotheses she wants to test."
Read more about Piperno's work at Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5987/28.full)
Tag Cloud:
A. Townsend Peterson
administration
Andrew Short
antarctica2014
Caroline Chaboo
Chris Beard
entomology
fossil
grant
Herpetology
herps
ichthyology
identification
informatics
Leonard Krishtalka
Leo Smith
Michael Engel
museum
Natural History Museum
ornithology
paleobotany
Paul Selden
Philippines
Philippines 2009
Philippines 2010
Philippines 2012
Rafe Brown
research
ssar2015
vertebrate-paleontology