By Staff Writer Jerri Clewis
Corn is one of the world’s most important crops because of its relatively easy growth and multiple uses. It can be eaten as is, popped, turned into flour or syrup, or made into ethanol, grain-based alcohol, or biodegradable plastic. Around the world, people rely on the crop daily for these uses, but corn was only sometimes the champion it is now.
The golden corn-on-the-cobs topped with a slab of butter or a big bowl of freshly popped popcorn didn’t exist thousands of years ago. Neither did any form of corn that we recognize today.
Ancient peoples in southwestern Mexico found the early ancestor of corn, a wild grass called teosinte, around 9,000 years ago. The grass had hard kernels on ears smaller than a finger. Still, cultivators saw use in the grain, perhaps out of necessity for food. It became a staple in their diets, according to the Smithsonian.
Corn’s history became more complicated from there. The food was tough and probably not the tastiest. Still, it had the potential to be something more significant, just like other previously discovered grains, which may have contributed to its adoption.
Early farmers began selecting favorable traits from the teosinte. This process lasted thousands of years, but there were varying levels of success and speed of domestication. Although the process began in Mexico, partially domesticated maize from the center of domestication found its way to southwest Amazon, where it was quickly adopted into farming practice and evolved more rapidly compared to its counterpart in Mexico, according to a study conducted by Logan Kistler of the Smithsonian.
The findings discovered that corn, commonly believed to have been domesticated entirely in Mexico, took two evolutionary paths. The two paths were partially separate as the study found evidence of humans carrying maize from South America back to Mexico, which would have added greater genetic diversity to the center of domestication.
After thousands of years, the efforts of early farmers paid off, and they fully domesticated corn, transforming it into the food product people know and love. By the 15th century, domesticated corn had spread throughout the Americas and became the primary food source it still is today.