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First partially domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass, maize has only reluctantly given up the secrets of its long development. Genetic research, Kennett said, has been challenging because a scarcity of suitable cobs in an environment not kind to organic material. Researchers, however, caught a break in Honduras.
“Well-preserved maize is extremely rare in the Americas, but the El Gigante rock shelter has over 10,000 specimens to work with,” he said. “Most of these fragmentary remains date later than 2,500 years ago, and locating earlier material in the assemblage was challenging and required directly radiocarbon dating large numbers of maize cobs.
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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.