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Thomas Harper
Some 9,000 years ago, corn as it is known today did not exist. Ancient peoples in southwestern Mexico encountered a wild grass called teosinte that offered ears smaller than a pinky finger with just a handful of stony kernels. But by stroke of genius or necessity, these Indigenous cultivators saw potential in the grain, adding it to their diets and putting it on a path to become a domesticated crop that now feeds billions.
Despite how vital corn, or maize, is to modern life, holes remain in the understanding of its journey through space and time. Now, a team co-led by Smithsonian researchers have used ancient DNA to fill in a few of those gaps.
When Bruce Byers brought home a piece of petrified wood he inherited after his father died in 2012, he didn’t plan to make it the subject of a new area of research. His father had collected the hunk of rock in Bears Ears, Utah, in the 1980s and had long used it as a doorstop. But with the 210-million-year-old fossil newly situated in his home, something niggled at Byers. The ancient log looked to him like it had a fire scar (
below, on right), a wood growth formation that happens at the base of a tree in response to a low-intensity ground fire. A patch of live tissue under the bark is killed, and the tree grows scar tissue curled around the wound in response. Byers recalls, “I thought, ‘This is interesting. I’ve never heard of a fossil fire scar.’”
December 17th, 2020, 6:00AM / BY Erin Malsbury
Tens of millions of years of bird evolution guided some of the most important elements of human-powered flight. (Pixabay)
On December 17 in 1903, the Wright brothers achieved what humans had dreamed about since the earliest days of our species: soaring through the air. For millennia, visionaries watched birds take wing and wondered how they might do the same. Notes and inspiration from bird flight were integral in helping people finally achieve the goal, but our version of flying as well as how we got there contrasts starkly with that of birds.
While human flight came about through intense focus on a singular goal, flight in birds evolved incrementally over millions of years without direction. The path to modern birds was full of forks, twists and dead-ends.
Ideas, Inventions And Innovations
Ancient DNA Rewrites Corn s 9,000-Year Society-Shaping History
Three 2,000-year-old cobs in Honduras show that people brought corn varieties back to Mesoamerica, possibly sparking productivity and shaping civilization.
Three roughly 2,000-year-old con cobs from the El Gigante rock shelter site in Honduras. These corn cobs were genetically analyzed by an international team of scientists. In the Dec. 14 issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Logan Kistler, curator of archaeogenomics and archaeobotany at the Smithsonian s National Museum of Natural History, and an international team of collaborators report the fully sequenced genomes of three roughly 2,000-year-old cobs from the El Gigante rock shelter in Honduras. Analysis of the three genomes reveals that these millennia-old varieties of Central American corn had South American ancestry and adds a new chapter in an emerging complex story of corn s domestication