Sunday, December 07, 2008 - Twiltley Branch Campground, Collinsville MS
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Taking Flight, Foscue Creek Park, Demopolis AL, Dec 01, 2008
Night camp
Site 39 - Twiltley Branch Campground, Collinsville MS
- This is a quiet, well maintained COE campground with level gravel sites, reservoir views, electric & water
- There is good biking on the park roads
- Most sites are wooded so solar gain is limited for those with solar panels
- Good Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies from slow to barely useable
- Find other references to Twiltley Branch
- List the nights I've camped here
- Check the weather
- Reserve a site
- Get a map
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.