Real archaeologists mostly find small, almost valueless objects—and won’t know for years, or decades, what mystery they are resolving. Consider this ancient ear of maize, which Walter Hough...

Maize / meɪz / (Zea mays), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native Americans planted it alongside beans and squashes in the Three Sisters polyculture.

Nov 30, 2023 · Maize is one of the world’s most important crops, but its origins have long bedeviled scientists. It took more than a century for scientists to settle on the idea that it was domesticated about 9000 years ago in the lowlands of Mexico from a wild grass: a subspecies of teosinte called parviglumis.

Nov 23, 2016 · According to an international team of scientists who have sequenced the genome of a 5,310-year-old maize cob from the Tehuacan Valley, the maize grown in central Mexico more than five millennia ago was genetically more similar to modern maize than to its wild counterpart.

Dec 4, 2024 · Indigenous maize varieties from eastern North America have played an outsized role in breeding programs, yet their early origins are not fully understood. We generated paleogenomic data to reconstruct how maize first reached this region and how it was selected during the process.

Dec 5, 2024 · Researchers have tested ancient DNA from corn found at archaeological sites in Arkansas, shedding new light on the dispersal of one of the world’s most important food crops.

Dec 6, 2024 · By reconstructing the genomes of archaeological maize cobs and kernels, the study reveals that 1,000-year-old maize from rockshelters in the Ozark region of Arkansas shares a close genetic link with modern Northern Flint varieties.

Dec 14, 2018 · In 2016, two independent research groups analyzed the DNA of 5,000-year-old maize cobs from a cave in Mexico, and found that the ancient corn was still in the midst of the domestication...

Dec 5, 2016 · The complex evolutionary history of maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) has been clarified with genomic-level data from modern landraces and wild teosinte grasses [1, 2], augmenting archaeological findings that suggest domestication occurred between 10,000 and 6,250 years ago in southern Mexico [3, 4].

Nov 17, 2016 · Scientific analysis of a cob of corn dating back 5,000 years shows how maize became one of our most popular cereals. Farming by early civilisations started a process of domestication that...