in the spirit of earth day i wanted to make a thread ab the ancestry of maize bc corn rly is that bitch (1/10)

for a long time until the first half of the 20th century it was accepted that no close ancestor of maize existed, and that it probably came from a species of wild corn that went extinct n didnt leave trace (2/10)

but turns out a couple of scientists at the time found evidence that linked maize to a wild mexican grass called teosinte. it has really thin and small ears, with extremely hard kernels stacked rather than on a cob, making it seem like a stretch at first. (3/10)

(3.1/10) it was even considered a closer relative to rice than to corn at the time

however a geneticist found that they indeed shared similar chromosomes, and with this information decided to create crosses of the two plants and ended w fertile hybrids that appeared as varying intermediates to both (4/10)

it took a couple decades before his claim was accepted tho, as other scientists argued that there were too many genetic differences across the plants for the domestication process to have taken less than a couple thousand years (5/10)

(5.1/10) white men always underestimating indigenous ppls abilities w their crops smh

so in order to gain more evidence of their relation, the geneticist used cross hybridization in order to find the frequency at which the parental genotypes would appear, and thus determine how many genes (4-5) were involved w the major phenotypical differences of the two (6/10)

dna tracking was then used to determine the time and location at which this domestication occured, which dates back 9,000 years in the central balsas river valley in southern mexico (7/10)

archeological evidence also shows that the earliest recorded usage of maize was around 8,700 years ago, which falls nicely with the genetically estimated time of domestication (8/10)

the initial domestication process is also now estimated to have lasted several hundred to a couple thousand years tops, in contrast with the initial scientific reasoning of teosinte and corn having multiple thousands of years of genetic differences (9/10)

all this to show tho, indigenous ppls of the americas were astounding geneticists that were able to transform a grass that had a crazy amounts of undesirable and in-consumable traits into a high-yielding crop (10/10)

happy earth day