Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert.
Reconstructions of the botanical vocabulary offer clues to the ecological niche inhabited by the Proto-Uto-Aztecans.
[5][6][7][8][9] Using computational phylogenetic methods, Wheeler & Whiteley (2014)[10] also suggest a southern homeland for Proto-Uto-Aztecan in or near the area occupied by historical Cora and some Nahua.
Nahuatl forms the most basal clade in Wheeler & Whiteley's (2014) Uto-Aztecan phylogram.
That supports a conclusion that the Proto-Uto-Aztecan speech community did not practice agriculture but adopted it only after entering Mesoamerica from the north.