Revealed by a multidisciplinary effort: the history of the domestication of corn is not as we thought
Revealed by a multidisciplinary effort: the history of the domestication of corn is not as we thought
.The domestication of corn, a process that began in the current center of Mexico almost 9000 years ago, was much more complex and nuanced than previously thought, according to a new study. The results of an analysis of the genetic heritage of ancient grains point to the southwest of the Amazon as a secondary center of improvement for early maize.
The findings offer a new vision of the human-mediated evolutionary processes that gave rise to one of the most important basic crops on the planet. In a related Perspective article, Melinda Zeder writes: "The new and surprising multidisciplinary study of the spread of maize throughout northern South America is a good example of recent advances in unraveling the complex histories of early domestication."
Domesticated corn evolved from the teosinte, a wild herbaceous from Mexico, and spread rapidly throughout the Americas, filling the early agricultural landscapes and becoming an almost ubiquitous source of food at the time of the arrival of Europeans. While the domestication of corn was widely considered to have taken place only once, the nature of its domestication and its spread throughout South America remains unclear and the archaeological and genomic data available do not always coincide.
Logan Kistler and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of South American maize, both domesticated native varieties and ancient maize archaeological samples, and compared them with the genetic lineages of modern and ancient corn and teosinte throughout the world. According to Kistler et al., The results suggest that ancestral maize reached South America "semi-domesticated".
Isolated from their Mexican parents before the genetic flags of domestication could be fixed, different South American lineages managed to evolve, some of which were completely domesticated under continuous human selection. Combining their genomic findings with archaeological, paleoecological and linguistic data, the authors suggest that this parallel, although independent, secondary improvement probably began in the southwestern Amazon. (Source: AAAS)
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