Ancient Sunflower Fuels Debate About Agriculture In The Americas

Researchers have confirmed evidence of domesticated sunflower in Mexico — 4,000 years before what had been previously believed. “People sometimes ask “What is the big deal about sunflower?” says the professor of biological sciences involved with the research. “First of all, sunflower is one of the world's major oil seed crops and understanding its ancestry is important for modern crop-breeding purposes," he says. "For a long time, we thought that sunflower was domesticated only in eastern North America, in the middle Mississippi valley — Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois. This is what traditional textbooks say. Now it appears that sunflower was domesticated independently in Mexico." "The Mexican sunflower discovery suggests that there may have been some cultural exchange between eastern North America and Mesoamerica at a very early time,”he adds. “Now the textbooks need to be rewritten.”