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ANTHROPOLOGY
Since the 1930s, botanists and archaeologists have suggested that plant domestication developed independently in a few core areas and spread from there across the world. With its diversity of root and tuber plants, spices, fruit trees, and other crops, Southeast Asia seemed to be a perfect candidate for such a core area (1-3). Some authors included New Guinea in their scenarios, but generally the island was seen as a passive recipient of domesticated plants and animals from the Southeast Asian heartland.
Today, the picture has changed completely. From a "Neolithic backwater," New Guinea has turned into one of the few pristine centers of early plant domestication (see the first figure). There is increasing evidence that two of the world's most valuable crops, sugar cane and banana, originated there. On page 189 of this issue, Denham et al. (4) provide convincing evidence that the banana was cultivated in New Guinea as long as 7000 years ago.
Archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies have long hinted at the antiquity of New Guinean plant cultivation (5), but direct evidence was tenuous. Similar to other humid tropical areas, larger plant remains, such as seeds and fruits, do not preserve well in the swampy soils of the New Guinean highlands where agriculture was proposed to have emerged. Sediment and pollen data provided evidence for deforestation and erosion since at least 7000 years ago (6). It remained unclear, however, whether early farmers had cleared the montane forest for their fields, or hunter-gatherers had burned the forest to improve access to wild plants and animals.
One of the best-studied archaeological sites in...