Corn Domestication Essays

Never would someone had thought that the richness of a crop's production could bring power to early humans, becoming almost as a revolutionary concept. Today maize-fields are cultivated for food, economic and medicinally productions, but it does not represent anything special in today's society as it was before. In the Popol Vuh maize is an important concept and symbol that expands to ideas that many anthropologists and professionals cannot understand completely. Yet, when reading the Popol Vuh there are many examples of when maize is used to represent its importance. Maize is the most important idea in the Popol Vuh because it provides food, it results in wealth, it represents a political system and it shows hierarchy.

Maize is a wild plant and was discovered by Indians. It belongs to the same grass family as barley, rye, rice, wheat, and oats. When the Pilgrims landed in North America in 1620, the Indians gave them maize to eat. They also showed the Pilgrims how to grow maize. The Pilgrims called the maize “corn”, which mean grains and Americans still call it corn today. The word corn has a different meaning depending on what country you are in. According to the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University, corn in England means wheat and in Scotland and Ireland, it means barley or oats (www.agron.iastate.edu).   By drawing on documents and reports from the Pre Columbian American era, I plan to discuss how corn was discovered, the importance of it, and how it was used by Pre Columbian Americans.

Our hypothesis was that there would be no difference between the actual phenotypic ratio and predicted phenotypic ratio of the ear of corn labelled G. As each row of corn was being counted and recorded, a trend appeared, revealing that purple-smooth corn kernels were by far the most common, followed by purple-wrinkled and yellow-smooth corn kernels, with yellow-wrinkled corn kernels appearing the least. The corn kernels appeared in this pattern because the corn kernel with two dominant traits (purple being the dominant color, along with smooth being the dominant texture) would take precedence over the recessive yellow color and wrinkled

Maize or corn is a domesticated plant of the United States. The Native Americans founded it and it quickly spread to other parts of the world. The Native Americans transformed maize by carefully cultivating. Maize developed from a wild grass called Teosinte that originally grew in Southern Mexico, 7,000 years ago. The Teosinte kernels looked completely different from the kernels of today’s corn or maize. Teosinte kernels were small and separated from each other. The first cobs of corn were only a couple inches long with only eight rows of kernels. The cobs eventually started to grow and increases the yields of the crops. Maize agriculture did not reach Southern New England until a thousand years ago.

Genetically modified crops have become increasingly popular in the last few decades. Despite the fact that they are a controversial topic: we see GMOs as a growing technology that if regulated and tested will have great benefits when it comes to conserving water. One of the ways they are modifying genes is to make the plant more drought tolerant and take less water to germinate. In addition, to produce a better yield while practicing dry land farming and controlled irrigation water conservation. There are studies trying to modify the plants so that they can increase the rate of photosynthesis and depth of root structure. Scientists are also trying to decrease the rate of water loss through transpiration. “Corn, the crop with the highest global production, annually sustains losses on the order of 15 percent of potential yield attributable to drought. As the climate changes as a consequence of global warming, some climates will become more arid, increasing drought and resulting in up to 10 million more lost tons of maize per year. It has been estimated that 25 percent of these losses may be resolved by genetically modifying maize to be more drought tolerant.” (Clive.

The main argument in this article is how it explains we as society have evolved with corn and some people think we do not need it or have not evolved. The author wants to show us how crops can grow everywhere and that we the people should

So what is corn? Corn as we know it today, was known as a wild grass called teosinte. Fossils of wild corn pollen over 80,000 years old have been discovered in the sediment at the bottom of a lake under Mexico City. It’s believed to have been cultivated by the Mayan, Aztec, and Inca Indians approximately 5,000 years ago. We have learned that early Indian tribes used

The element of corn is the basis of the Mexican diet and is found in almost every dish, usually in the form of a tortilla or flatbread. Central Mexico first developed corn about 5000 to 7000 years ago and the crop came to be known as maize. Popular traditional fruits and vegetables include squash, sweet potato, avocado, mango, nopales, and tomatoes. The tomatoes composing the pico de gallo date back an impressive 1300 years to the Aztec civilization of Ancient Mexico. Initially known as tomatl in the Nahuatl language, the wildly-grown fruit was not only central to the Aztecs’ diet but also believed to have contained divine powers given to those who consumed it. However, the main element of the dish, skirt steak, is not a traditional aspect of Mexican culture. Modern Mexican cuisine is composed of European elements added after the Europeans arrived in Mexico in early 16th century. Europeans introduced a large number of other foods, the most important of which were meats from domesticated animals (beef, pork, chicken, goat, and sheep), dairy products (especially cheese), and various herbs and

Native Americans started the development of maize. In 1491 Mann says, “Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet”(pg17). With the spread of maize the Indians caused several

Corn is a vegetable I consider a gift and so do Native Americans. It’s known and appreciated around the world as a multipurpose staple. Corn as we know it today was first founded as a wild grass called Teosinte, it is believed to be over 80,000 years old, first discovered and cultivated by the Inca’s, and the Mayans almost 5,000 years ago. Scientist are still finding corn pollen in the in the lakes beneath Mexico City. Corn was often planted with Squash and Beans and was lovingly nicknamed the Three Sister’s because they protected each other through the way they grew in similitude and benefited each other space, and nutritional levels they were helpful against the climates processes that would be detrimental to each of them. While the Native Americans view corn as a gift

Now it is very much so different than it was before. Now a day 's use of pesticide is utilized during corn cultivation, this will keep the corn protected from any type of harm such as disease or infection carrying insects. Throughout the years, cross-fertilization amid development brought on hereditary changes that changed corn into the shape and size we now know. Today, corn is still more prevalent in this nation than anyplace else on the planet.

macrocarpus) as important components of their diets, even after the establishment of maize as a staple

The expectations of every farmer is to have high productivity of high quality when it comes to their crops. However, due to bad weather conditions this has just been a mere dream for many small holders’ farmers. Biotechnology has developed some seedlings such as the “WEMA”that are water efficiency and can resist drought since they do not require a lot of water to grow (AATF-Africa. 2015). In addition, this kind of seedlings have been made with gene compositions that are from tough environment to make them possible to withstand and climatic conditions. The purpose of a such a move is to provide hope to the farmers from the dry regions where the normal maize seedlings are not able to give high output of products (Varshney et al. 2011).

Corn is one of the most dominate crops in the US and a major cereal grain though out the world. It can be processed to yield fiber, oil and protein. Corn is primarily processed in four main ways: dry milling, alkaline processing, wet milling and dry grinding. Wet milling is the most efficient commercial way to extract zein.

2011). Furthermore, population genomic tools have helped improve our understanding of phenotypic evolution in crop species like maize (Ducrocq et al. 2008; Hufford et al. 2012; van Heerwaarden et al. 2012), rice (Olsen et al. 2006), and sorghum (Morris et al. 2013; Lasky et al. 2015; Zhang et al. 2015).