“Unparalleled Discovery” of Ancient Skeletons Reveals First Use of Maize in Mesoamerica - SciTechDaily

By University of New Mexico.

Almost any grocery store is filled with products made from corn, also known as maize, in every aisle: fresh corn, canned corn, corn cereal, taco shells, tortilla chips, popcorn, corn sweeteners in hundreds of products, corn fillers in pet food, in soaps and cosmetics, and the list goes on.

Maize is perhaps the most important plant ever domesticated by people, topping 1 billion tonnes produced in 2019, double that of rice, according to University of New Mexico Anthropology professor Keith Prufer, Principle Investigator of a team that just released new research that sheds light on when people started eating maize.

Until now, little was known about when humans living in the tropics of Central America first started eating corn.

Excavations were directed by UNM Professor Keith Prufer along with an international team of archaeologists, biologists, ecologists and geologists.

Our paper is the first direct measure of the adoption of maize as a dietary staple in humans,” Prufer observed.

Prufer said the international team of researchers led by UNM and University of California, Santa Barbara is investigating the earliest humans in Central America and how they adapted over time to new and changing environments, and how those changes have affected human life histories and societies.

Radiocarbon dating of the skeletal samples shows the transition from pre-maize hunter-gatherer diets, where people consumed wild plants and animals, to the introduction and increasing reliance on the corn.

Maize made up less than 30 percent of people’s diets in the area by 4,700 years ago, rising to 70 percent 700 years later.

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.

“We hypothesize that maize stalk juice just may have been the original use of early domesticated maize plants, at a time when the cobs and seeds were essentially too small to be of much dietary significance.

This changed as human selection of corn plants with larger and larger seeds coincided with genetic changes in the plants themselves, leading eventually to larger cobs, with more and larger seeds in more seed rows,” Prufer explained.

Prufer noted, “We can directly observe in isotopes of bone how maize became a staple grain in the early populations we are studying.

We know that people had been experimenting with the wild ancestor of maize, teosintle, and with the earliest early maize for thousands of years, but it does not appear to have been a staple grain until about 4000 BP.

After that, people never stopped eating corn, leading it to become perhaps the most important food crop in the Americas, and then in the world.”.

Analysis was conducted at Penn State University, UNM Center for Stable Isotopes, UCSB, and Exeter University in the UK.

The study was conducted by researchers from UNM, UCSB, Pennsylvania State University, University of Exeter, The US Army Central Identification Laboratory, University of Mississippi, Northern Arizona University, and the Ya’axche Conservation Trust in Belize.

Reference: “Early isotopic evidence for maize as a staple grain in the Americas” by Douglas J.

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, was conducted by academics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of New Mexico, The Pennsylvania State University, University of Exeter, Central Identification Laboratory, University of Mississippi, Northern Arizona University and the Ya’axche Conservation Trust in Belize

June 2, 2020

June 1, 2020