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