We are the Sons of Maize

I was surprised to learn that the Neolithic peoples of the Americas genetically engineered corn.  I knew that corn was native to the Americas, but I was not aware that Native Americans bioengineered what we now know as corn from the teosinte plant; this has to be one of the most important accomplishments of the Neolithic era, especially for the Americas.  Nowadays, we don’t think too much about corn, some may even argue that corn gets a bad rap in our modern diets—think corn syrup—but if we transport ourselves to the world of the first tribes that migrated to the Americas we would probably owe our lives to the discovery of corn.

Let’s take a brief look back at what would be like to be in one of those first Native Americans.  We have been traveling for a while, a lot of our companions have died, and yet we keep following the ever-decreasing animals that are our main source of food.  The climate is changing, the animals are dying, and we need to move away from the rising ocean.  We need to find a more permanent settlement; we need to find a place where we have a vantage point and where we can build homes and gather more plants to survive.  Eventually we come to a place in what is now central Mexico, and the gatherers find this plant which seem to have edible seeds; there are lots of these plants and they are growing like grass; they also resemble grass except they have these small edible kernels, and as a bonus the kernels are kind of sweet.

Women are starting to create dishes with these wild plants and the gatherers notice that there are some plants that have more seeds than others.  The tribe consensus is that we could actually stay here and live off these plants.  So we start building houses by bunching together the non-edible stalks of the plant and branches from bigger trees.  Someone suggests that we search the fields to find the plants with the most seeds and we discover that the plants with the most seeds tend to grow in their own particular areas.  So, we start isolating some of those areas and season after season we see that the seeds are getting bigger and moreover more seeds are growing per plant.  The same process continues every season and we continue to prosper from the newly found source of nutrition.  Eventually, we are not only isolating the best crops, we are planting the best seeds and we continue to notice that when we plant the best plants next to each other we get bigger and better plants; sometimes we get plants that have two sets of kernels and if we tear up the smaller of the two, we get food earlier in the season and the other set grows even bigger.

This has been a brief history of the maize plant and how it contributed to the settlement of the first peoples of Mexico.  Maize eventually spread throughout the American continent.  Corn, beans, and squash sustained Native Americans for generations and contributed to the establishment of the great tribes of the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas as well as the great Native American tribes of the United States.

Back in the 80’s there was a Nicaraguan populist song that proclaimed that we are the “sons of the maize” and went on reciting about 30 popular dishes made out of corn.  At the time, there was a United States blockade on wheat and other food products; the main message of the song is that even without wheat, we can always survive by planting corn because we are the “sons of the maize.”  Reading the history of corn has reminded me of this song because, after all, there was some truth to the communist propaganda.

Sources used:  NativeTech: Native American Technology and Art.  NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY OF CORN.  Web source.  Accessed on May 26, 2014.  http://www.nativetech.org/cornhusk/cornhusk.html

What is Wealth?

I had a reflection moment after learning about the lives of the first human societies and how they did not have the need for the “accumulation of goods”.  It sounds like Paleolithic people had the ultimate utopian society.  These societies were gatherer-hunters with a highly mobile way of life.  The need to be mobile arose from the fact that resources are finite in a particular geographical area, and once the resources were depleted, they needed to move on; without agricultural knowledge there was no surplus production to store; hence, no need to build permanent structures.  There were a limited number of rules which maintained the norms of society but there was no need for a formal government structure; individuals in Paleolithic societies knew what needed to be done and they did not perform more tasks than was necessary.  Individuals had more free time to pursue their own interests, and in that sense they acted as “wealthy people”.  These societies had no specializations, so individuals possessed a relatively equal skillset and equality between man and women was “far more equal than in later societies.” (Strayer, p. 21).

Here we have a society where everybody was truly equal; people worked to survive as a group, sharing the resources they had gathered from foraging and hunting.  There weren't any rankings which could determine who was higher up on the class structure.  So, when did humanity lost this utopia?  Where things actually as good as they sound?  Humanity lost this—in my opinion—utopian way of life the moment there was a need to store resources.  The need to store resources came when there was surplus production due to agriculture.  Surplus resources equal wealth; it does not matter what type of surplus one has, the fact that you have something to protect, something to trade, something to differentiate you from another person or group, in my opinion, is wealth.

Surplus resources (wealth) stimulate human greed and give way to society’s problems.  Greed makes people want to steal, it makes people to go to war to capture the wealth, and it also makes people to want equality.   The problem is the different ways that people go about trying to achieve equality; while some may want to work hard to get ahead, others simply want to take by force, and unfortunately the latter is the easier course of action.  But what prompted the change to agriculture?  Things were not easy for Paleolithic societies, proof of this is the small population numbers.  Mortality was high and people was typically at the mercy of the environment, which varied constantly during this era.  Imagine humans living in fragile structures at the mercy of wild animals, which were large and fearless of humans.  Starvation was probably a leading cause of death at the time and hence it prompted the need to find better and more stable sources of food.

So, in my opinion, wealth is necessary but its consequences are undesirable.  Now, let’s take one step further; agricultural societies stored goods to be used during times of scarcity, but what is the need to accumulate immense amounts of money.  Money, just like bushels of wheat, is an accumulated resource (wealth).  It is well understood that some people accumulate more money that they will ever need; yet, the more money we have, the more we tend to want to accumulate.  I believe that the concept of scarcity is encoded in every human’s brain; this is what has saved us through the ages—arguably they may have been what made Homo sapiens prevail over other species of hominines.  However, the practicality of it when it comes to money is sometimes unnecessary.  Would you like to live in a Paleolithic society?

 Sources: Ways of the World (2^nd Edition) – A Brief Global History with Sources by Robert W. Strayer.

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