Corn Domestication Essays

The history of corn can be dated back to the beginning of time, but the use and value of corn had been unnoticed until it was introduce by the Native Americans. Where corn had seemed to be a big part of their everyday life from, being in myths, legends, and for a huge portion of their diet corn was an essential component. "when the Europeans had touched base to the New World during the late fifteenth century, the Native Americans had introduced corn what they had called maize to the Europeans .This crop was then later on grown and adapted from Canada to southern South America very quickly, which then began to form the new basis of the New World civilization" (Leventin & McManhon, 2012). The way corn has been changing and revolutionizing throughout time has been both fascinating and drastic. Rather than conventional corn being grown, it is genetically modified corn that have been dominating today 's crop industry and farming but the question remains as to how the various types of GMO corn has influenced the way it is grown and used and what its ramification are.

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

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.

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 development of corn, also known as maize around 5,000 B.C. in Mexico was a great success for their people, for they didn 't have to be hunter-gatherers anymore, they could settle in a certain area and become farmers. Towns and cities quickly grew throughout Mexico, and corn arrived in the modern day United States around 1,200 B.C.

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.

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.

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

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.

The origin of GMOs started in 1982 by an experiment done by the United States Department of Agriculture, in which they changed the genes of a tomato plant. Commercial use of Genetically Engineered crops began in 1996 (Fernandez-Cornejo et al. pg 7). While developing Genetically Modified Organisms, scientists and researchers characterized the types of Genetically Engineered crop traits into

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

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

Depictions of corn can be seen in in almost every aspect of Mexican culture. Maize is held with such significance that jade, the most sacred stone was used to symbolize the maize (Bollier). Maize is seen as both physical nourishment and cultural nourishment, without the cultivation of maize the expansion of many cultures could not have been possible. Maize plays the dual role of being a reservoir and a chosen glory, because

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