Maize: Its History & Production In The Americas

[ramonmercado]

Published online: 1 March 2006;
| doi:10.1038/news060227-7
Early Andean maize unearthed
Ancient finding suggests Peruvians could have been making tortillas 4,000 years ago.
Michael Hopkin

Archaeologists have found the oldest evidence so far of agriculture in the Andes. The discovery shows that ancient Peruvians were growing and eating maize some 4,000 years ago - more than a millennium earlier than previous records had suggested.

Maize was originally cultivated in Mexico, and archaeologists have evidence that the crop was grown as early as 7,000 years ago in Ecuador. But they had previously not known how quickly the practice spread south into the Andes.

The development of agriculture in this area marks a cornerstone in the development of civilization in the Andes: a process that ultimately led to the rise of the Incas, who dominated the region from about 1100 AD until the arrival of European settlers.

Cooking with flour

The discovery came after researchers unearthed the remains of a house at Waynuna, high on the slopes of the Cerro Aycano peak above Peru's Cotahuasi Valley. Inside, on the floor of the dwelling, they found microscopic remains of plants including maize, potato and arrowroot.

Stone tools also found on the hut's floor were covered with plant remains, and the maize grains showed signs of having been ground into flour. This suggests that the inhabitants of Waynuna were growing and processing their own food.

The presence of remains from both cobs and leaves in the hut suggests that the villagers grew and processed their food at the same place, says Linda Perry of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, who led the team of researchers that publishes the work in this week's Nature1. It's unclear exactly what they would have cooked, she adds, "But if they were grinding it into flour, they were probably either making tortillas or a kind of bread."

Trading up

Arrowroot grows in tropical rainforests but not on mountainsides. So its presence in the hut suggests that villagers in Peru's highlands were already trading with lowlanders, says Perry.

"I'm very surprised but delighted to see arrowroot there, because archaeologists always suspected important trade routes between mountains and the tropical forests," Perry says.

Waynuna would have been a great place to settle for early Peruvians. The hut was found at the border between where potatoes could be grown, on the upper slopes, and where maize could be cultivated below. It is also near a rich source of obsidian, one of the most valuable commodities in primitive Andean cultures because of its usefulness for making tools.

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References
Perry L., et al. Nature, 440. 76 - 79 (2006). | Article |

Story from [email protected]:
http://news.nature.com//news/2006/060227/060227-7.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Mummy's amazing American maize
09 Feb 2007

The far-reaching influence of Spanish and Portuguese colonisers appears not to have extended to South American agriculture, scientists studying a 1,400-year-old Andean mummy have found.
The University of Manchester researchers compared the DNA of ancient maize found in the funerary offerings of the mummy and at other sites in northwest Argentina with that grown in the same region today.

Surprisingly, they found both ancient and modern samples of the crop were genetically almost identical indicating that modern European influence has not been as great as previously thought.

"The entire culture of South America changed when the Europeans arrived in the 15th century - everything from the language to the whole way of life," explained Professor Terry Brown, who headed the research in the Faculty of Life Sciences.

"Maize is the staple food crop of the region but prior to colonisation it also had a ritual significance - the indigenous people were amazed by maize and even worshipped it.

"Given the immense changes that took place in South America following the arrival of the Europeans it is surprising that this crop has remained unaltered for hundreds of years."

Using the new facilities in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre - a cross-faculty institute at the University - Professor Brown is now examining the DNA of ancient maize from Peru, up to 6,000 years old, to determine if these much older specimens are also similar to modern crops.

Ends

Notes to editors:

The research was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Link to paper: http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link ... 2604073w78

Professor Brown's research partner on the project was Dr Veronica Lia at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Hi-resolution image of the mummy is available on request courtesy of the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

For further details contact:

Aeron Haworth
Media Officer
Faculty of Life Sciences
The University of Manchester

Tel: +44 (0)161 275 8383
Mob: +44 (0)7717 881563
Email: [email protected].

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/new ... ?id=103198

 

[EnolaGaia]

Newly published research provides the clearest picture of maize's domestication and spread throughout Mesoamerica.

“Unparalleled Discovery” of Ancient Skeletons Reveals First Use of Maize in Mesoamerica

Maize is perhaps the most important plant ever domesticated by people, topping 1 billion tonnes produced in 2019, double that of rice, according to University of New Mexico Anthropology professor Keith Prufer, Principle Investigator of a team that just released new research that sheds light on when people started eating maize.

Recently published research from his team in the journal Science Advances reveals new information about when the now-ubiquitous maize became a key part of people’s diets. Until now, little was known about when humans living in the tropics of Central America first started eating corn. But the “unparalleled” discovery of remarkably well-preserved ancient human skeletons in Central American rock shelters has revealed when corn became a key part of people’s diet in the Americas. ...

" ... Given its humble beginnings 9,000 years ago in Mexico, understanding how it came to be the most dominant plant in the world benefits from deciphering what attracted people to this crop to begin with. Our paper is the first direct measure of the adoption of maize as a dietary staple in humans,” Prufer observed.

"“Farming allowed us to live in larger groups, in the same location, and to develop permanent villages around food production. These changes ultimately led in the Maya area to the development of the Classic Period city states of the Maya between 3,000 and 1,000 years ago. However, until this study, we did not know when early Mesoamericans first became farmers, or how quickly they accepted the new cultigen maize as a stable of their diet. ..."

Radiocarbon dating of the skeletal samples shows the transition from pre-maize hunter-gatherer diets, where people consumed wild plants and animals, to the introduction and increasing reliance on the corn. Maize made up less than 30 percent of people’s diets in the area by 4,700 years ago, rising to 70 percent 700 years later.

Maize was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass growing in the lower reaches of the Balsas River Valley of Central Mexico, around 9,000 years ago. There is evidence maize was first cultivated in the Maya lowlands around 6,500 years ago, at about the same time that it appears along the Pacific coast of Mexico. But there is no evidence that maize was a staple grain at that time. ...

To determine the presence of maize in the diet of the ancient individuals, Prufer and his colleagues measured the carbon isotopes in the bones and teeth of 52 skeletons. The study involved the remains of male and female adults and children providing a wholistic sample of the population. The oldest remains date from between 9,600 and 8,600 years ago and continues to about 1,000 years ago ...

... 4,700 years ago, diets had become more diverse, with some individuals showing the first consumption of maize. The isotopic signature of two young nursing infants shows that their mothers were consuming substantial amounts of maize. The results show an increasing consumption of maize over the next millennium as the population transitioned to sedentary farming.

Prufer noted, “We can directly observe in isotopes of bone how maize became a staple grain in the early populations we are studying. We know that people had been experimenting with the wild ancestor of maize, teosintle, and with the earliest early maize for thousands of years, but it does not appear to have been a staple grain until about 4000 BP. After that, people never stopped eating corn, leading it to become perhaps the most important food crop in the Americas, and then in the world.” ...

FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/unparallel...ns-reveals-first-use-of-maize-in-mesoamerica/

 

[Tempest63]

We plant Maize as a cover crop for the pheasants on our shoot. It is quite funny that newbies, either shooters or beaters, mistake it for sweetcorn and take some home with them. They can boil it for a month of Sunday’s and the kernels still remain as hard as stones.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Here are the bibliographic particulars and abstract of the new report. The full article can be accessed at the link.

Early isotopic evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas

Douglas J. Kennett1,Keith M. Prufer, Brendan J. Culleton, Richard J. George, Mark Robinson, Willa R. Trask, Gina M. Buckley, Emily Moes, Emily J. Kate, Thomas K. Harper, Lexi O’Donnell, Erin E. Ray, Ethan C. Hill, Asia Alsgaard, Christopher Merriman, Clayton Meredith, Heather J. H. Edgar, Jaime J. Awe and Said M. Gutierrez
Science Advances 03 Jun 2020:
Vol. 6, no. 23, eaba3245
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba3245

Abstract
Maize is a cultigen of global economic importance, but when it first became a staple grain in the Americas, was unknown and contested. Here, we report direct isotopic dietary evidence from 52 radiocarbon-dated human skeletons from two remarkably well-preserved rock-shelter contexts in the Maya Mountains of Belize spanning the past 10,000 years. Individuals dating before ~4700 calendar years before present (cal B.P.) show no clear evidence for the consumption of maize. Evidence for substantial maize consumption (~30% of total diet) appears in some individuals between 4700 and 4000 cal B.P. Isotopic evidence after 4000 cal B.P. indicates that maize became a persistently used staple grain comparable in dietary significance to later maize agriculturalists in the region (>70% of total diet). These data provide the earliest definitive evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas.

SOURCE: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/23/eaba3245

 

[AnonyJ]

I've always wondered that if the native Americans already living there hadn't taught the new arrivals from Europe how to nixtamalise maize, would the colonisation attempts have eventually failed, unless they were assimilated into local cultures (as perhaps happened at Roanoke). Would the USA even exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization