Evidence from dirty teeth: Ancient Peruvians ate well

Starch grains preserved on human teeth reveal that ancient Peruvians ate a variety of cultivated crops including squash, beans, peanuts and the fruit of cultivated pacay trees. This finding by Dolores Piperno, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Museum of Natural History, and Tom Dillehay, professor of archaeology at Vanderbilt University, sets the date of the earliest human consumption of beans and pacay back by more than 2,000 years and indicates that New World people were committed farmers earlier than previously thought.

Read the whole article

See latest science articles from Biology News Net