Maize—Indian corn—is at once the
most sophisticated and cosmopolitan of vegetals used by man, and the most
domesticated. About 700 varieties were being grown in America at the time of
Columbus’ intrusion and these have since multiplied enormously to 8000 varieties,
so that corn has become adapted to climes from sea level to 12,000 feet high in
the Andes, from belts of almost no rain to belts of 200 inches, from the 9-day
summer of Canada to the 365-day summers of the equator, from fields where it
must mature between early June and middle-August frosts to fields that produce
two crops a year. But corn as we know it today cannot live without man because
it cannot seed itself. . . . Paul Mangelsdorf, of the Botanical Museum of
Harvard, reporting for the team which found and studied the fossil pollen,
states the present and probably definitive status of maize as follows:
“(1) Mazie is undoubtedly an
American plant.
(2) Maize undoubtedly had at least one center of origin in Middle America.
(3) The ancestor of maize is maize.
(4) The ancestor of maize is a form of pod corn, but perhaps not the extreme
type of pod corn known today. The ancestor was certainly a popcorn.
(5) Sometimes in its history maize hybridized with tripsacum or teosinte or
both to produce radically new types which comprise the majority of modern maize
varieties of Norther America.” (Louis A. Brennan, No Stone Unturned: An
Almanac of North American Prehistory [London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1960],
289-91)
