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Friday, November 21, 2008 - Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL

Slide - Foscue Creek Park, Dec 22, 2007
Slide - Foscue Creek Park, Dec 22, 2007

It's nice to be off the road for a while

Getting in the groove of rolling down the road this past week has taken me away from normal domestic routines. Laundry to do. Cleaning away the road grime. And settling the psychic mud that gets stirred up on the road. It's time to chill for a few days.

Night camp

Site 45 - Foscue Creek Campground, Demopolis AL

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.

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