When was corn discovered

It was started from a wild grass called teosinte. Teosinte looked very different from our corn today. The kernels were small and were not placed close together like kernels on the husked ear of modern corn.

Also known as maize Indians throughout North and South America, eventually depended upon this crop for much of their food. About years ago, as Indian people migrated north to the eastern woodlands of present day North America, they brought corn with them. The ancient cob is less than a 10th of the size of modern corn cobs, at about 2cm 0. And the ancient cob produced only eight rows of kernels, about half that of modern maize. The DNA of the specimen, known as Tehuacan, is unusually well preserved.

Sequencing of the genome of the 5,year-old corn cob shows that it was genetically more similar to modern maize than to its wild ancestor. The ancient maize already carried genetic changes that make kernels soft and palatable. And it had lost the hard cases around the kernels seen in wild grasses.

About 5, years ago, indigenous people in Mexico were both hunter-gatherers and farmers. They probably got most of their calories from wild plants and hunting, but at certain points in the year used food such as maize to supplement their diets.

The team also looked at the DNA of 11 ancient plants. When they mapped out the genetic connections between the specimens, the researchers discovered several distinct lineages, each with their own unique relationship to teosinte. Most significantly, the results revealed that although maize domestication began with a single large gene pool in Mexico, the grain was carried elsewhere before the domestication process was complete.

The partially domesticated maize seems to have landed in the southwest Amazon, which was already a hotspot for the domestication of other plants, including rice, squash and cassava. Kistler theorizes that maize was adopted into farming practices there, giving the domestication process a chance to pick up where it left off. It is possible, though not certain, that maize in this new location evolved more quickly than maize in the center of domestication, which would explain why the 5,year-old cobs from the cave in Mexico appear to be in an intermediary phase of domestication at a time when maize was already being cultivated in the Amazon.

After incubating in the southwest Amazon for several thousand years, maize went on the move again, according to the study authors—this time to the eastern Amazon, where it grew amidst a general flourishing of agriculture that archaeologists have observed in the region. Another interesting discovery lay in the fact that modern maize from the Andes and southwestern Amazon is closely related to maize grown in eastern Brazil, which points to another movement eastward. This aligns with archaeological evidence—like the spread of ceramic traditions, for instance—suggesting that people in the Americas started expanding to the east around 1, years ago, according to Kistler.