A Florida State University anthropologist has new evidence that ancient farmers in Mexico were cultivating an early form of maize, the forerunner of modern corn, about 7,300 years ago - 1,200 years earlier than scholars previously thought.

The conclusions from an analysis of sediments in the Gulf Coast of Tabasco, Mexico, were that people were planting crops in the "New World" of the Americas around 5,300 B.C. The shift from foraging to the cultivation of food was a significant change in lifestyle for these ancient people and laid the foundation for the later development of complex society and the rise of the Olmec civilization.

The discovery of cultivated maize in Tabasco, a tropical lowland area of Mexico, challenges previously held ideas that Mesoamerican farming originated in the semi-arid highlands of Mexico and shows an early exchange of food plants.

For the full story: Anthropologist Finds Earliest Evidence Of Maize Farming In Mexico, Science Daily.