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Source: Smithsonian Date: July 9, 2007 Ancient Americans Liked It Hot: Mexican Cuisine Traced To 1,500 Years Ago Science Daily — One of the world's tastiest and most popular cuisines, Mexican food also may be one of the oldest. These chili peppers from the Guila Naquitz cave in Oaxaca Mexico date to between A.D. 490 and 780, and represent two cultivars or cultivated types. A Smithsonian scientist analyzed the chili pepper remains and determined that Pre-Columbian inhabitants of the region hundreds of years ago enjoyed a spicy fare similar to Mexican cuisine today. (Credit: Linda Perry, Smithsonian Institution) Plant remains...

For men of the ancient Zapotec civilization, ancestral thighbones may have been carried as status symbols. Based on centuries-old stone carvings in southern Mexico, archaeologists had long suspected that Zapotec men brandished human femurs. "The thought was that the femurs are those of the ancestors of the rulers, serving like staffs of office or symbols of legitimacy," explained archaeologist Gary Feinman of the Field Museum in Chicago. Now grave excavations have confirmed the practice, according to a new study. What's more, it seems that commoners got a leg up too. Flourishing from about 500 B.C. to A.D. 1000 in the...

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are...

WOODBURN, Ore. - Inching along the dusty field under a broiling sun, Simon Santol tossed garlic bulbs into buckets and chatted with the other stooped-over Mexican workers. The conversation wasn't in Spanish. Instead, they spoke Santol's native Triqui, or Mixtec, Zapotec or other languages indigenous to the poorest regions of Mexico. Many of the workers can barely get by in English or Spanish. "It was hard at first," the 28-year-old Santol said in halting Spanish. "We would look for someone who spoke our language and Spanish. Now I have learned a little Spanish. Grace of God." Immigrants who have not...