Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - Philadelphia MS
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Leaving Tuscaloosa
This Lazy Daze doesn't deal well with temperatures much below 30 degrees. It's just not well enough insulated. The cold air slides down the glass, out under the drapes and out across my bed. It was in the high teens last night - brrrrr.
I'm headed generally westward. Down 69 through Moundville Alabama then west through Eutaw Alabama and on westward toward Vicksburg Mississippi.
First stop - Moundville Alabama
I'm writing from the foot of the large mound at the Moundville Archaeological Site.
Night camp
Wal-Mart parking lot in Philadelphia, Mississippi
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.