Maize's early days

Michael Balter 3/24/2009 05:23:00 AM Science
Today on Science's online news service, ScienceNOW, I write about two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reporting the earliest known evidence for maize (aka corn) in the Americas. A team led by Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and Anthony Ranere of Temple University in Philadelphia dated microscopic maize fragments to 8700 years ago, found at the Xihuatoxtla Shelter in the Balsas River valley (pictured at right.)

The link is free for four weeks from today, so please give it a read. The photo in the inset depicts the unappetizing wild ancestor of maize, teosinte, which eventually was domesticated and took on the form we eat today (the yellow ear pictured is a genetic reconstruction, from crossing teosinte with modern maize, of what the earliest maize might have looked like.)

Photo credits: (rock) Anthony Ranere; (teosinte/maize) John Doebley

No doubt about Mt. Redoubt. Wow, now that the eruption is causing havoc and cancelled flights in Alaska, I will bet Governor Sarah Palin is pretty peeved with Bobby Jindal's dissing of volcano research right about now, right? Right?

When university journalism profs do their job too well. They don't get tenure. That's what happened to Christina Kopinski at Clark College in Washington state, anyway.
Michael Balter

Posted by Michael Balter

I have been a working journalist for more than 40 years, beginning in Los Angeles as an investigative reporter and then in Paris as a travel, food, and science writer. For more than 20 years I have covered anthropology and archaeology writer for Science, Audubon, Scientific American, SAPIENS, and other publications. I have also covered sexual misconduct for The Verge, Scientific American, and others; I write about mental health, especially schizophrenia; and I engage in occasional media criticism. I returned to the USA in October 2017 after 30 years in Paris, and now live in the New York City area, where I currently teach journalism at City College of New York (I previously taught journalism at Boston University and New York University.) For more about me and what I do, copies of my articles, information about my book, and other goodies, please visit MY WEB SITE

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1 Comments

Richard Parker said…
Maize/Teosinte

There's really no reason why a variety of different factors could not be reasons for teosinte being cultivated into edible corn.

Look at coconuts:

- The sap from the flower stem is still, today, tapped off to make alcoholic tuba, coconut 'wine'. That means prematurely cutting off the flowers, that could produce coconuts full of carbohydrates and useful cooking and fuel oil.

Immediate pleasure before ultimate gain.

- Wild coconuts - see: http://www.coconutstudio.com/Wild%20coconuts.htm
have very small fruits; nothing like modern human-selected and cultivated ones.

At some time, or more probably, over a very long time gradient, the starchy fruit became more valuable than the juice.

This was probably about the time when, world-wide, everybody entered the 'Neolithic Era' and started growing their own starchy food crops.

The same progression might be true of our own Western crops:
http://www.ranprieur.com/readings/origins.html
March 24, 2009 at 11:36 AM
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