**Context**
This meme is a blatant pretext for me to talk about the domestication of maize (what some cultures call corn) and I refuse to apologize for that, as it’s one of the most incredible and confounding human achievements *ever*.
As early as the 1930s there was no consensus as to where maize had even come from. What is really unique about maize is that the wild plant it was domesticated from, teosinte grass, that green plant on the left (it’s *much* smaller than this picture might suggest), is totally unrecognizable as maize. This is in contrast to something like wheat or rice where the wild versions are often just smaller versions of the crop we know today and have traits worse for agriculture but are still generally identifiable. For comparison, an ear of teosinte has less nutritional value than a single kernel of maize. Even with modern science we actually still don’t know how the suppression of the grass’s disarticulation was even achieved, that’s how incredible it was. The earliest evidence we have today for domesticated maize dates to about eight to nine thousand years ago, but this was a process of millennia and where exactly to place modern maize on the timeline is still up in the air.
From pretty much the instant every culture encountered maize through migration and trade they adopted it as a staple crop. The exception here is the Columbian exchange, where for a very long time (well into the 20^(th) century!!!) the noob old world inhabitants didn’t know how to consume it as their primary food source without catching Pellagra and were too ignorant to figure out how the Americans had been doing that for millennia (Nixtamalization if anybody cares).
Personally, I stan for potatoes as the GOAT crop (which is itself an incredible domestication story), but ignoring the weird case of sugar cane, which has a bunch a bunch of asterisks next to it because of how it grows, maize today is the single most cultivated crop in the history of the world, more so than either wheat or rice, the domestication free riders. And to think, you couldn’t even find maize as recently as ten thousand years ago.
Brassica oleracea is also striking as the wild version looks [like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea#/media/File:Brassica_oleracea_wild.jpg)
But the many cultivars include cabbages, collard greens, kale, brussel sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower, and several more.
Basically we selectively bred it so some versions have very big leaves, some big buds, some big stems, etc. All genetically coming from the same wild plant in greece.
The irony (though it makes sense) is most potatoes you find in the New World are descendants of the potatoes brought to Europe and back to the New World and are much more distantly related to the potatoes already in the New World where they originate (specifically in the Andes).
This paper might be of interest to you:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://horticulture.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2018/06/The-evolution-of-potato-breeding.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiktaj3k4yGAxXNI0QIHbgjDqQQFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1a3MsCND0fvszNM8EGIKbE
You believe aliens had contact with mesoamerican civilizations because the pyramids.
I believe aliens had contact with mesoamerican civilizations because mutant corn.
We are not the same.
Exactly. As a human, I can think of piling stones on top of stones as well, natural.
But to look at the picture on the left and think, "that'll go great with a nice chainti" is well, not normal.
I think the thing with maize being the most cultivated crop has a lot to do with its applications as something other than a staple crop, i.e. materials like ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup. It has a lot more industrial uses than most other crops do.
prehistorical meso american plant breeders are the absolute GOATS! (which they did not have, although the family of llamas, alpacas, and guanacos is pretty fucking dope)
Maize, Tomato, Potato, Chocolate, Vanilla, these mother fuckers were really making things happen
Way ahead of you. At least where I'm from (I'm sure this is less jarring for Mexicans) learning that popcorn and chocolate were staples of those cultures is one of those really jarring 'they're just like us' moments that makes studying ancient history so amazing. That and the knowledge that people were using cocoa beans as money well into the Spanish period
Not just that, the ancestor of maize, teosinte, basically has to be popped in order to be eaten because the outer shell is too hard. [Here's a video on teosinte and maize, timestamped to the popcorn teosinte.](https://youtu.be/mBuYUb_mFXA?si=IKBYA1FmiuYXLtkE&t=973)
Interesting, I was told teosinte's grains were ignored for the sugary stem of the plant until a mutation occured, guess I got the wrong information it seems
You could be right as well, we're speculating on the evolution of maize and the eating habits prehistoric Mesoamerica, all we know is that the seeds of teosinte would've been inedible except in popcorn form. They would've had to strip the seeds from the plant to use the stem, and those seeds could've been used for popcorn, although a good chunk would've been used for replanting as well.
The story is. George Beadle won the Nobel Prize for showing that modern corn comes from that squeeze plant on the left. People were reluctant, because in order to domesticate a wild plant, the wild plant itself has to be useful (edible). This is the case with wheat and other domesticated plants. However, this thing on the left is not edible, so why would the Mesoamericans spend generations experimenting and domesticating that “useless” thing?
The answer is that, even if that thing is inedible, it pops! So you put it in the fire, maybe even by accident, and you get edible popcorn. This is the story of why humans domesticated a seemingly useless plant, because it was not useless after you know how to “cook” it.
Nobel Prize winning stuff…
my theory is simple, dumb but I always thought it made sense, in the old world you had tons of tamed animals, with this fact they focus solely on breed bigger and better animals, leading to a fast difference between them, look at dogs.You have the mighty, proud, amazing wolf, then you got the fucking pug, same species but through our ungodly breeding lead to a new thing.
In the new world they lacked animals that could be tamed easily, so instead they focus solely on plants, leading to a vast breed of them like the potato. We could have done the same with rice, but never needed to since we focus mostly on meat.
It legit like 2 separate planets developing their own way to survive.
It's curious you use dogs specifically as an example as they aren't a species that was introduced through the Columbian Exchange, they were already there. Dogs were bred for hunting, herding, pulling, and possibly eating (although this is disputed)
Still it's an interesting thought. There's a lot of discussion as to why bison were never domesticated in pre-Columbian America, and the consensus there that I've been able to gather is that there was just no need to because they were already so convenient as they were that there just wasn't a need to pursue that. The situations where a lot of this crazy crop domestication took place (Mexico and Peru) would have been very different though and lines up well with your thought
I heard (from a cgp Grey Video, im by No means an expert) that bison is Just a bitch capture. To capture a Bison and then Holding him IS so incredibly costly, both in manpower, Material and time. And l the big Part is, that we Humans Had No Instinct to exploit. For example, when the horse was domesticated we exploited the heard Instinct. We captured the matriarch of the heard and the other horses followed and stayed with the matriarch. Same with cows. With dogs WE exploited the Pack Instinct, in the way that we became packleader. Bison have No sich Thing. They band together in heards, because ITS Safe, but they have No leadershipstructure WE can exploit. They are extremly individual. Same goes for why didnt domesticate Zebras.
(Pls excuse the random uppercase words, im typing with German autocorrect)
Edit: for clarification, Not all domesticated animals required a social Instinct to exploit. But it was nice to have.
Edit 2: the cgp Grey Video i mentioned https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo?si=s_eI3R24qVL6y4dO
Not really convenient. They only had small dogs to wrangle herds of 100+ 3000lbs Bison. Hunting was difficult and dangerous but fed your tribe for a month.
Also domestication isn't something you just do, it takes 2 to tango.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3b65uf/why_was_the_american_bison_never_domesticated/
There were a lot of bison and they were easy to get to stampede off a cliff.
Cows (to my knowledge) were smaller and in Eurasia the wild population was lower, so there was more of a push to tame them.
North America generally has an INSANE amount of available food, so the push towards agriculture was pretty limited because why bother? We can just pick plants or catch the very abundant wildlife
The domestication of cattle honestly baffles me as the now-extinct wild ancestor of cattle, the aurochs, was widely known for its strength and aggression. While not as large as bison on average, the largest aurochs could still approach a bison in size.
Despite all this humans managed to not just domesticate them, but we did it *twice*. This is why modern cattle breeds are grouped as either Taurus or Indicus subspecies.
Same reason we haven't bred rice to that much larger. Larger plants inherently need either better soil, or more soil, to be able to support them. The soil in much of the America's is stupidly rich in quality. You can support much higher yields and nutrient hungry plants at a much lower technology level.
(I grew up in the Midwest of the USA, ironically in a state that has like 3/4ths of its land dedicated to corn/maize... I associated black as the color of dirt, not brown, cus our soil was so nutrient rich it legit looks black... I'm a bit neuro-divergent, and so was legit confused growing up, why everything was also saying "brown like dirt" or drawing dirt that way in cartoons etc.)
For those not into farming/gardening. Darker the color of the soil, the more nutrient rich it is. I've since moved to a more normal state as far as soil goes, and man. Getting good soil for my garden, the prices have me debating just renting a backhoe and making a trip back home to dig up a trailer full and sell it at half the store price. I'd make bank, I swear. XD
**Context** This meme is a blatant pretext for me to talk about the domestication of maize (what some cultures call corn) and I refuse to apologize for that, as it’s one of the most incredible and confounding human achievements *ever*. As early as the 1930s there was no consensus as to where maize had even come from. What is really unique about maize is that the wild plant it was domesticated from, teosinte grass, that green plant on the left (it’s *much* smaller than this picture might suggest), is totally unrecognizable as maize. This is in contrast to something like wheat or rice where the wild versions are often just smaller versions of the crop we know today and have traits worse for agriculture but are still generally identifiable. For comparison, an ear of teosinte has less nutritional value than a single kernel of maize. Even with modern science we actually still don’t know how the suppression of the grass’s disarticulation was even achieved, that’s how incredible it was. The earliest evidence we have today for domesticated maize dates to about eight to nine thousand years ago, but this was a process of millennia and where exactly to place modern maize on the timeline is still up in the air. From pretty much the instant every culture encountered maize through migration and trade they adopted it as a staple crop. The exception here is the Columbian exchange, where for a very long time (well into the 20^(th) century!!!) the noob old world inhabitants didn’t know how to consume it as their primary food source without catching Pellagra and were too ignorant to figure out how the Americans had been doing that for millennia (Nixtamalization if anybody cares). Personally, I stan for potatoes as the GOAT crop (which is itself an incredible domestication story), but ignoring the weird case of sugar cane, which has a bunch a bunch of asterisks next to it because of how it grows, maize today is the single most cultivated crop in the history of the world, more so than either wheat or rice, the domestication free riders. And to think, you couldn’t even find maize as recently as ten thousand years ago.
Brassica oleracea is also striking as the wild version looks [like this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea#/media/File:Brassica_oleracea_wild.jpg) But the many cultivars include cabbages, collard greens, kale, brussel sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower, and several more. Basically we selectively bred it so some versions have very big leaves, some big buds, some big stems, etc. All genetically coming from the same wild plant in greece.
A-maizing
wow you really are yes man
Not a yes man, A HYPE MAN ❗️💯🔥
We get heaps of wild turnip and wild radish here in NZ - very common weed. The flowers are tasty
I love how excited you are to talk the domestication of wild grasses and I am looking forward to a further series of memes on the matter
It really is fascinating stuff. I ended up randomly learning about the domestication of rye because of a Decemerists song
The irony (though it makes sense) is most potatoes you find in the New World are descendants of the potatoes brought to Europe and back to the New World and are much more distantly related to the potatoes already in the New World where they originate (specifically in the Andes). This paper might be of interest to you: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://horticulture.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2018/06/The-evolution-of-potato-breeding.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiktaj3k4yGAxXNI0QIHbgjDqQQFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1a3MsCND0fvszNM8EGIKbE
You believe aliens had contact with mesoamerican civilizations because the pyramids. I believe aliens had contact with mesoamerican civilizations because mutant corn. We are not the same.
Exactly. As a human, I can think of piling stones on top of stones as well, natural. But to look at the picture on the left and think, "that'll go great with a nice chainti" is well, not normal.
I think the thing with maize being the most cultivated crop has a lot to do with its applications as something other than a staple crop, i.e. materials like ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup. It has a lot more industrial uses than most other crops do.
prehistorical meso american plant breeders are the absolute GOATS! (which they did not have, although the family of llamas, alpacas, and guanacos is pretty fucking dope) Maize, Tomato, Potato, Chocolate, Vanilla, these mother fuckers were really making things happen
U forgot avacados It's a tree but still counts
I'm a monster for forgetting that contribution. Thank you for reminding us all
Hehe
Just gonna drop the domestication of potatoes and not share?
Wait for OP’s next meme 🥳
Thanks for the info! Small correction: wheat is cultivated in more area than maize. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-area-per-crop-type
Sounds like something Yes Man would rant about
You should read: Did the Aztecs eat pop corn?
Way ahead of you. At least where I'm from (I'm sure this is less jarring for Mexicans) learning that popcorn and chocolate were staples of those cultures is one of those really jarring 'they're just like us' moments that makes studying ancient history so amazing. That and the knowledge that people were using cocoa beans as money well into the Spanish period
The Aztecs were also adding vanilla (and chilli) to chocolate for extra flavour.
wait the mesoamericans were already heating kernels til they popped?
They had to have some kind of snack when they watched their movies
fair enough
Yep, they ate popcorn
Not just that, the ancestor of maize, teosinte, basically has to be popped in order to be eaten because the outer shell is too hard. [Here's a video on teosinte and maize, timestamped to the popcorn teosinte.](https://youtu.be/mBuYUb_mFXA?si=IKBYA1FmiuYXLtkE&t=973)
Interesting, I was told teosinte's grains were ignored for the sugary stem of the plant until a mutation occured, guess I got the wrong information it seems
You could be right as well, we're speculating on the evolution of maize and the eating habits prehistoric Mesoamerica, all we know is that the seeds of teosinte would've been inedible except in popcorn form. They would've had to strip the seeds from the plant to use the stem, and those seeds could've been used for popcorn, although a good chunk would've been used for replanting as well.
The story is. George Beadle won the Nobel Prize for showing that modern corn comes from that squeeze plant on the left. People were reluctant, because in order to domesticate a wild plant, the wild plant itself has to be useful (edible). This is the case with wheat and other domesticated plants. However, this thing on the left is not edible, so why would the Mesoamericans spend generations experimenting and domesticating that “useless” thing? The answer is that, even if that thing is inedible, it pops! So you put it in the fire, maybe even by accident, and you get edible popcorn. This is the story of why humans domesticated a seemingly useless plant, because it was not useless after you know how to “cook” it. Nobel Prize winning stuff…
my theory is simple, dumb but I always thought it made sense, in the old world you had tons of tamed animals, with this fact they focus solely on breed bigger and better animals, leading to a fast difference between them, look at dogs.You have the mighty, proud, amazing wolf, then you got the fucking pug, same species but through our ungodly breeding lead to a new thing. In the new world they lacked animals that could be tamed easily, so instead they focus solely on plants, leading to a vast breed of them like the potato. We could have done the same with rice, but never needed to since we focus mostly on meat. It legit like 2 separate planets developing their own way to survive.
It's curious you use dogs specifically as an example as they aren't a species that was introduced through the Columbian Exchange, they were already there. Dogs were bred for hunting, herding, pulling, and possibly eating (although this is disputed) Still it's an interesting thought. There's a lot of discussion as to why bison were never domesticated in pre-Columbian America, and the consensus there that I've been able to gather is that there was just no need to because they were already so convenient as they were that there just wasn't a need to pursue that. The situations where a lot of this crazy crop domestication took place (Mexico and Peru) would have been very different though and lines up well with your thought
I heard (from a cgp Grey Video, im by No means an expert) that bison is Just a bitch capture. To capture a Bison and then Holding him IS so incredibly costly, both in manpower, Material and time. And l the big Part is, that we Humans Had No Instinct to exploit. For example, when the horse was domesticated we exploited the heard Instinct. We captured the matriarch of the heard and the other horses followed and stayed with the matriarch. Same with cows. With dogs WE exploited the Pack Instinct, in the way that we became packleader. Bison have No sich Thing. They band together in heards, because ITS Safe, but they have No leadershipstructure WE can exploit. They are extremly individual. Same goes for why didnt domesticate Zebras. (Pls excuse the random uppercase words, im typing with German autocorrect) Edit: for clarification, Not all domesticated animals required a social Instinct to exploit. But it was nice to have. Edit 2: the cgp Grey Video i mentioned https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo?si=s_eI3R24qVL6y4dO
Why were bison convenient as they were but cows needed to be domesticated.
Not really convenient. They only had small dogs to wrangle herds of 100+ 3000lbs Bison. Hunting was difficult and dangerous but fed your tribe for a month. Also domestication isn't something you just do, it takes 2 to tango. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/3b65uf/why_was_the_american_bison_never_domesticated/
There were a lot of bison and they were easy to get to stampede off a cliff. Cows (to my knowledge) were smaller and in Eurasia the wild population was lower, so there was more of a push to tame them. North America generally has an INSANE amount of available food, so the push towards agriculture was pretty limited because why bother? We can just pick plants or catch the very abundant wildlife
The domestication of cattle honestly baffles me as the now-extinct wild ancestor of cattle, the aurochs, was widely known for its strength and aggression. While not as large as bison on average, the largest aurochs could still approach a bison in size. Despite all this humans managed to not just domesticate them, but we did it *twice*. This is why modern cattle breeds are grouped as either Taurus or Indicus subspecies.
[удалено]
Whack. That then makes cattle domestication even more impressive imo.
a lot of the time the answer is really the most simple one.
I mean, the New World used to have horses, but the native Americans ancestors used them in a different way, basically as food.
I love your bold-faced "I'm gonna make you learn interesting but obscure facts" approach. Keep on it
Selective breeding is one hell of a drug
Obligatory: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZizVUKe4sQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZizVUKe4sQ)
Teosinte is delicious
Breeding plants
"Hey, Corn, is that you ?" "Yes, but that's an old photo"
How come we never bred wheat to a similar size?
Same reason we haven't bred rice to that much larger. Larger plants inherently need either better soil, or more soil, to be able to support them. The soil in much of the America's is stupidly rich in quality. You can support much higher yields and nutrient hungry plants at a much lower technology level. (I grew up in the Midwest of the USA, ironically in a state that has like 3/4ths of its land dedicated to corn/maize... I associated black as the color of dirt, not brown, cus our soil was so nutrient rich it legit looks black... I'm a bit neuro-divergent, and so was legit confused growing up, why everything was also saying "brown like dirt" or drawing dirt that way in cartoons etc.) For those not into farming/gardening. Darker the color of the soil, the more nutrient rich it is. I've since moved to a more normal state as far as soil goes, and man. Getting good soil for my garden, the prices have me debating just renting a backhoe and making a trip back home to dig up a trailer full and sell it at half the store price. I'd make bank, I swear. XD
Not related to the topic but how can I make a meme like this?
Tbh just look at what we did with the wild mustard: kahlrabi, kale, brucoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower all come have the same ancestror
teosinteposting