Corn, Columbus, and Culture

CORN, COLUMBUS, AND CULTURE WALTON C. GALINAT* Gifts from East-West Meeting This is the 500th anniversary of a great event in human history, when Christopher Columbus finally merged the eastward and westward migrations of humankind. From the heartland of humanity in Africa, they spread westward to the Atlantic Ocean, north into Europe, east into Asia, across the Bering Straits and down through the Americas, stopped again only by the barrier of the Atlantic Ocean. The spread over more than 200,000 years, perhaps leaving Africa a million years ago, was in a continuous search for food. At first most of the food came from hunting. It was supplemented by gathered food, especially if storable, such as nuts and seeds. Then farming developed, when it was discovered that food plants grew from seed that had been squirreled away or thrown into garbage heaps. Under farming, food plants became domesticated and technical agriculture developed. The new abundance of food under agriculture allowed for a more settled way of life, and for larger populations with the leisure time to build more complex societies. The old practice of hunting and gathering food became only supplemental, sometimes part of a so-called sport, or totally absent for most city dwellers. As a result of the migrations, isolation, and tribal warfare, diverse races of people with different cultures, languages, religions, food plants, and animals, had differentiated along the way. After the east-west reunion of 1492, an exchange of gifts, accumulated on their separate journeys, was possible. A leap forward in the cultural evolution of humans , and the biological evolution of domestic plants and animals, could become based, with caution, on the entire resources of planet earth. This paper is dedicated in gratitude to the Americas' indigenous people for their gift of maize, and to the memory of George Beadle with recognition of his understanding of the teosinte origin of maize. *University of Massachusetts, Eastern Agricultural Center, Waltham, Massachusetts 02154.© 1992 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/93/3601-0793$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 36, 1 ¦ Autumn 1992 \ Sometimes the significance of an experiment, or the final outcome of any endeavor, far exceeds the wildest expectations of the investigator. Columbus planned to reach the Orient by sailing westward because he believed the world to be round. However, the world was much bigger than had been realized. His voyage lead to the discovery of a pair of great continents, North and South America, that bordered on an even greater ocean—the Pacific. Columbus expected to find spices and gold. Instead the native people on northeastern Cuba, whom he mistakenly called Indians, presented him with the gift of maize. Columbus did not appreciate that maize was far more valuable than the spices and gold that he had hoped to find. (See Fig.l). As part of the 500th celebration of the role of Columbus in humar history we must reflect on the greatest gift of all—the super cereal that the Americas' first people called maize, that is now called corn in the United States and is known to taxonomists as Zea mays L. (Fig.l). The Transformation of Teosinte into Maize, A Rapid Process ofDomestication Columbus had no way of knowing that the origin of maize traced back some 8,000 years, or that it represented a remarkable piece of plant breeding. There always was a suspicion that maize came from teosinte, but the magnitude of the transformation by plant breeding many thousands of years ago was too difficult for many traditional botanists to accept. Teosinte was first placed in a separate genus, Euchlaena, from that of maize, Zea. Then teosinte was dismissed as ancestor of maize by claiming it was just a hybrid between maize and Tripsacum [1], a hypothesis generally held for 25 years. However, right from the start, George Beadle [2] perceived that maize must have come from teosinte by ancient plant breeding, and that the key differences were not that large. The current objections to an origin of maize by domestication of teosinte are based on the narrow time frame set by the archaeological record more than 7,000 years ago and on the low...