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Earlier this year Douglas J. Kennett, a UC Santa Barbara professor of anthropology, demonstrated that maize, or corn, became a staple crop in the Americas 4,700 years ago. It turns out he was just beginning to tell the story of the world s biggest grain crop.
In a new paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kennett and his co-authors report that by analyzing the genomes of ancient maize they are able to fill in some of the gaps in the 9,000-year-old history of corn, which was first partially domesticated in southwestern Mexico and spread through Central and South America fairly rapidly.