The Evolution of Corn (Maize)-It Did Not Originate In North America

Of all the strange, unknown plants that explorers found in the New World, corn is arguably the second most important.

The native Inca population called it “maize” and the harvest of maize could mean the difference between abundance and starvation for these highly advanced peoples.          

Corn or maize (zea mays, is a domesticated grass and like many other indigenous plants; beans, squash, melons, and tobacco for example, it is of South American origin- so much for the claims of some Canadian and United States of the Americas First Nations tribes.

European colonists quickly adopted maize agriculture from the natives of Central and South America. These crops quickly spread to other parts of the world as well.

Over a period of probably thousands of years, the Incas and some other tribes of South America purposefully transformed maize through special cultivation techniques. Maize was developed from a wild grass (Teosinte) originally growing in South America and as far up as southern Mexico. The ancestral kernels of Teosinte looked very different from today’s corn. These kernels were small and were not fused together like the kernels on the husked ear of early maize and modern corn.

By systematically collecting and cultivating those plants best suited for human consumption, native South Americans encouraged the formation of ears or cobs on early maize. The first ears of maize were only a few inches long and had only eight rows of kernels (much like the tiny cobs sometimes used in Chinese food). Cob length and size of early maize grew over the years and gradually increased the yields.

Eventually the productivity of maize cultivation was great enough to make it possible and worthwhile for a family to produce food for the bulk of their diet for an entire year in a small area although agriculture permitted a family to live in one place for an extended period of time, the commitment to agriculture involved demands on human time and labour and often restricted human mobility. The genetic alterations in Teosinte changed its food value as a food resource and at the same time affected the human scheduling necessary for its effective procurement.

As the life ways of mobile hunting and gathering were often transformed into sedentary agricultural customs, very slowly the cultivation of maize, along with beans, squash and tomatoes was introduced into the southern parts of North America The practice of maize agriculture did not reach the southern parts of what is now the United States of North America until about a thousand years ago.