By Justin Isherwood

Corn is amaizing stuff.  Never mind there is no excuse for that opening line.  The original cause was an article in Smithsonian as portrayed “the transformation of this weedy grass into one of the world’s most important  food stuffs … is far more complex than anything we can do today in a lab.”

As a 21st century citizen I am a touch insulted by this statement “far more complex than anything we can do today in a lab.”  As if CRISPR wasn’t now a genetic wrench we can buy on-line. And to say corn was a “weedy grass” is to blaspheme corn’s origin, despite it may strike the right chord.  While “weedy” is appropriate in view of our modern corn’s monolith, we ought ask why our ancestors adopted corn as a companion species, unless this weedy thing was useful.

The average Corn Belt Goliath averages 18 rows, 800 kernels, 12-16 inch cobs and runs to 300 plus bushels per acre, US average about 150 bushels, on some 89 million U.S. acres, globally 200 million, all of which had this weedy grandmother, adopted by some indigenous prospector 8 or 9 thousand years previous.  A moment as would turn hunter gatherers into farmers and to make the world safe for villages, bankers and student loans.

To call native corn a weedy grass is to ignore the obvious, for our ancestors this diminutive grass was a food, soon after a reliance, one they took home and cultivated.  Original teosinte was a two inch long cob with eight rows of tiny hard kernels. The kernels so hard to be known as flint corn. Think popcorn. Ever have popcorn flour? Probably not.  This lowly “weedy” plant was a major food find and why it got taken home and made an enterprise of the New World.

A new method of carbon dating has moved the moment of corn’s “domestication” to something like 2500-3000 years ago.  What previous carbon dating had placed at 8-5 thousand years is now 2-3 thousand years. Previously carbon dating used the wood char at the site to date the remains of the corn found.  Turns out these campsites may have been in use for a thousand years by the time the inhabitants began the transformation of corn from its native source. With accelerator mass spectography, the necessary sample size for dating purposes has been reduced to as little as 1/200th of a gram of this archeological corn, in turn destroyed for the individual counting of carbon 14 atoms, and the time since last alive.  Now 2300-2400 years ago.

A question remains, how did modern corn happen from such humble beginnings?  What the Smithsonian article challenged a modern lab couldn’t do. Plant genetics are now quite different from the earlier GMOs, including its franken-food fears.  With CRISPR, genetics now has a degree of accuracy previously unavailable.

Our fields, pastures, orchards, paddies and gardens are inhabited by highly modified plants, whose resemblance to their original form is dim.  Still the question, how did they do it? How did they take corn from not-ready-for-prime-time to the Corn Belt Goliath? We know the mechanism, save the best and biggest seed, plant it, let these plants have carnal knowledge and save the offspring.  The pertinent question, how long did it take for this method to demonstrate benefit? None of our ancestors in those caves west of Mexico City were PhD plant breeders. No Mendels, no Monsanto. How did they overcome the desire to eat the best seed and plant the runts?   

Religion probably had something to do with it, to suggest religion is what made hunters into farmers.  Any right-thinking dirtball will forego eating the good stuff if he/she thinks God ought get first choice.  They saved the big cob for God or gods. The following spring it was still in the collection plate, they planted this seed in God’s honor.  We know where this plot goes; bigger crop, longer ears, more kernels. Wild maize went from a “weedy grass” to life-saving, urban-sprawl corn in a surprisingly short time. The difference between wild teosinte and modern corn is the regulation of five genes.  Five genes provide more rows, longer cob, softer kernels, shorter growing season. For native practitioners, this act of seed selection was worship, we know it as science.

Corn may have proceeded from a weedy grass to civilization’s tent pole in a century or two, maybe even in the memory of these people.  As may explain why the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec built their pyramids and filleted the hearts of slaves and virgins. Because they had witnessed how an act of worship had turned a weedy grass into the chance of civilization.  They didn’t yet know that God was science.