Cornshine

Here's a conundrum for you: The bone chemistry of Amerindian remains makes clear that maize (the vegetable most Americans call corn) became a dietary staple in the New World no earlier than 3,000 years ago in some areas and as recently as 500 years ago in others. Yet archaeological evidence indicates that people were cultivating teosinte, the ancestor of domesticated maize, more than 7,000 years ago. Back then the plant had small cobs and small, hard kernels of little nutritional value. So why grow it?

John Smalley, an independent researcher, and Michael Blake, an archaeologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, suggest that sugar from the stalk, not starch from the grain, was the big draw. The stalks of early maize--like those of sugarcane, its close Old World relative-probably yielded a sweet juice (a modern maize stalk contains as much as 16 percent sugar by weight). Smalley and Blake go even further: booze, they think, fermented from the sugary liquid, may have been the ultimate goal. After all, accounts dating from the time of the Spanish conquest (and thus before the introduction of sugarcane) mention maize-stalk beer. And judging by the similarity of historical names for it in otherwise distinct indigenous languages, the drink had already been popular for quite some time. ("Sweet beginnings: Stalk sugar and the domestication of maize," Current Anthropology 44:675-703, December 2003)

COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning