About 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico, hunter-gatherers began domesticating teosinte, a wild grass.
About 9,000 years ago in the Balsas River Valley of southwestern Mexico, hunter-gatherers began domesticating teosinte, a wild grass. Fast-forward to the present, and what was a humble perennial has been turned into the world’s biggest grain crop: maize.
Humanity deeply relies on maize, or corn, but just when it became a major food crop in the Americas has been a source of mystery and dispute.
Now, a UC Santa Barbara researcher and his collaborators, by testing the skeletons of an “unparalleled” collection of human skeletal remains in Belize, have demonstrated that maize had become a staple in the Americas 4,700 years ago.
In a new paper, “Early isotopic evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas” in the journal Science Advances, Douglas J. Kennett, a UCSB anthropology professor, details how the discovery of human skeletons buried in a rock-shelter over a period of 10,000 years opened a window on maize consumption nearly three millennia before the rise of Maya civilization.
Read more at University of California - Santa Barbara
Photo Credit: CLM-bv via Pixabay
