Dr. Michael Blake from the Department of Anthropology gives a talk this Tuesday October 16th at 7:00 p.m at the Museum of Anthropology:
Maize: The Plant that Colonized the World
Teams of scientists using a wide array of new techniques for detecting and studying ancient maize (corn) throughout the Americas are making surprising new discoveries about where, when and how the plant was first domesticated. They are also tracing its journey from 10,000 years ago in south-western Mexico, to the far reaches of South America and the borderlands between Canada and the U.S. By examining some of these new discoveries, ways that maize and humans forged a kind of mutual dependency in the millennia following its domestication will be explored. The ancient adaptability of Maize is reflected in its present-day roles as one of the world’s top three food crops and as a potential source of biofuel—ethanol—moving us through to the 21st century.
For further reading, see:
Histories of maize : multidisciplinary approaches to the prehistory, linguistics, biogeography, domestication, and evolution of maize / edited by John E. Staller, Robert H. Tykot, Bruce F. Benz. People and plants in ancient western North America / edited by Paul E. Minnis. The story of corn / Betty Fussell.
——
Photo credit: r-z