Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Corn eaten around the world today originated via a surprisingly long and complex process that started in what’s now southern Mexico around 9,000 years ago, a new study finds.
People brought a forerunner of present-day corn plants, also known as maize, to South America from Mexico more than 6,500 years ago. Those plants still contained many genes from maize’s wild ancestor, teosinte, say archaeologist and evolutionary ecologist Logan Kistler of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues. Farmers in Mexico and the southwestern Amazon, in parts of what’s now Bolivia and Brazil, continued to tame the partly domesticated plant over several thousand years, the international team reports in the Dec. 14 Science.
These results, based on a reconstruction of maize’s genetic history, challenge a longstanding idea that farmers in southern Mexico molded teosinte into fully domesticated maize relatively quickly around 9,000 years ago before the crop spread elsewhere.
“We’ve shown that parts of the process were taking place thousands of kilometers…
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