Maize cobs from Tehuacan, Mexico. Age of cobs in years, from left to right: 5,310; 5,280; 1,330; 1,220.NATURE PLANTS, R.S. PEABODY MUSEUM
It’s well established that maize was domesticated from teosinte, a wild Mexican grass. But the route of corn’s spread into what is now the southwestern United States has been more murky: archaeological evidence has suggested kinship with maize from either Mexico’s central highlands or the Pacific coast.
Now, an international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark has performed next-generation sequencing on 32 ancient corn samples covering a period of 6,000 years, and compared the ancient genes to those of modern maize. The results, reported today (January 8) in Nature Plants, suggest that the maize originally brought to the southwestern US came from the Mexican highlands around 4,000 years ago, while genotypes from coastal areas entered the mix some 2,000 years ...
