The earliest archaeological maize (Zea mays L.) from highland Mexico: New accelerator mass spectrometry dates and their implications

Accelerator mass spectrometry age determinations of maize cobs (Zea mays L.) from Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, produced dates of 5,400 carbon-14 years before the present (about 6,250 calendar years ago), making those cobs the oldest in the Americas. Macrofossils and phytoliths characteristic of wild and domesticated Zea fruits are absent from older strata from the site, although Zea pollen has previously been identified from those levels. These results, together with the modern geographical distribution of wild Zea mays, suggest that the cultural practices that led to Zea domestication probably occurred elsewhere in Mexico. Guilá Naquitz Cave has now yielded the earliest macrofossil evidence for the domestication of two major American crop plants, squash (Cucurbita pepo) and maize.

Archaeological evidence of teosinte domestication from Guilá Naquitz, Oaxaca

Analysis of the three most ancient Zea mays inflorescence fragments from Guilá Naquitz, Oaxaca, Mexico shows they did not disarticulate naturally, indicating that agricultural selection of domesticated teosinte was underway by 5,400 14C years before the present (about 4,200 dendrocalibrated years B.C.). The cooccurrence of two-ranked specimens with two rows and four rows of grain and numerous additional morphological characteristics of these specimens support hypotheses based on molecular and quantitative genetic analyses that maize evolved from teosinte. Domestication of the wild ancestor of maize occurred before the end of the 5th millennium B.C.

Symmetries in geology and geophysics

Symmetries have played an important role in a variety of problems in geology and geophysics. A large fraction of studies in mineralogy are devoted to the symmetry properties of crystals. In this paper, however, the emphasis will be on scale-invariant (fractal) symmetries. The earth’s topography is an example of both statistically self-similar and self-affine fractals. Landforms are also associated with drainage networks, which are statistical fractal trees. A universal feature of drainage networks and other growth networks is side branching. Deterministic space-filling networks with side-branching symmetries are illustrated. It is shown that naturally occurring drainage networks have symmetries similar to diffusion-limited aggregation clusters.

Scaling in geology: landforms and earthquakes.

Landforms and earthquakes appear to be extremely complex; yet, there is order in the complexity. Both satisfy fractal statistics in a variety of ways. A basic question is whether the fractal behavior is due to scale invariance or is the signature of a broadly applicable class of physical processes. Both landscape evolution and regional seismicity appear to be examples of self-organized critical phenomena. A variety of statistical models have been proposed to model landforms, including diffusion-limited aggregation, self-avoiding percolation, and cellular automata. Many authors have studied the behavior of multiple slider-block models, both in terms of the rupture of a fault to generate an earthquake and in terms of the interactions between faults associated with regional seismicity. The slider-block models exhibit a remarkably rich spectrum of behavior; two slider blocks can exhibit low-order chaotic behavior. Large numbers of slider blocks clearly exhibit self-organized critical behavior.