
UNM researchers document the first use of maize in Mesoamerica - Hooke
http://news.unm.edu/news/releases-20200601-6803126
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MintelIE
First KNOWN use. Diggers often claim to have found the first or earliest
whatever it is, but they omit the qualifier.

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throwaway_pdp09
Agreed and upvoted, I feel this sort of caveat should always be made. Also I
don't like some of their other language here, but on balance it doesn't look
like english is their strong point, so give them some slack.

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JoeAltmaier
I love how teosinte (maize forerunner) was cultivated for the alcoholic
beverage brewed from the stalk. The bigger seeds were selected by people, for
convenience in re-seeding. Not as a food crop. But once they got big enough to
grind and eat, it took off as a staple.

So the worlds' largest food crop owes its existence to - moonshiners.

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ncmncm
Right about the same time Egypt was getting itself civilized up, and beginning
to think about Pyramids.

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ianai
Indeed, the time frames really underscore a lot for me:

“ Maize was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass growing in the lower
reaches of the Balsas River Valley of Central Mexico, around 9,000 years ago.
There is evidence maize was first cultivated in the Maya lowlands around 6,500
years ago, at about the same time that it appears along the Pacific coast of
Mexico. But there is no evidence that maize was a staple grain at that time.”

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AlotOfReading
You don't normally see a lot of early domestication work coming out of Belize,
so this is nice to see. Most of the research has pointed to central Mexico as
the epicenter of maize domestication, but it looks like they have a way better
record to look at down there.

It's kind of strange how breatheless the UNM press office is to talk about the
hardships of the site though. Who measures distance by walking days? Kudos to
the team for managing what was surely a difficult site in notoriously gnarly
terrain though

