Corn's ancestor was a weed? Yes, and it's still there today

The history of human civilization is accompanied by the history of human domestication of other organisms, and this domestication includes both animals and plants.

Humans domesticate animals to become livestock, and also domesticate wild plants to become crops. Long, long ago, there were no so-called crops on Earth, no vegetables, no fruits, and no grain crops. Early human ancestors relied on hunting and picking wild fruits for a living. Therefore, some psychologists have analyzed that the reason why men and women have completely different attitudes towards "shopping" is related to the way their ancestors lived.

Before humans entered the agricultural society, men were responsible for hunting and women were responsible for picking wild fruits. Hunting had to be planned, from the hunting location to how to track and trap. Picking wild fruits was extremely random and required walking, looking and discovering. This way of survival was engraved in the genes and passed down.

Whether hunting or picking wild fruits, they are actually extremely unstable and full of dangers, so human ancestors began to try to bring back some plants that looked good for planting, and then humans gradually entered agricultural civilization.

All the crops we see now did not exist from the beginning, but are the result of continuous optimization over a long period of time. When a certain individual in some plants undergoes a beneficial random mutation, becoming thicker, taller, or bearing more fruits than other individuals, its seeds will be preserved by the ancestors, and this is how we have today's rich and delicious crops step by step. Later, humans gradually mastered more agricultural knowledge, and hybridization technology also emerged. We can finally take the initiative to promote the evolution of crops in a direction that is beneficial to humans.

When talking about hybridization, one person cannot be ignored, that is Yuan Longping and his hybrid rice.

Everyone knows about Yuan Longping's contribution to mankind, but many people don't know how difficult the birth of hybrid rice was, and how hard Yuan Longping worked for it. Hybridization, in simple terms, is to cross two plants to form different genetic diversity, and then obtain the excellent traits of the parent plants through screening. Doesn't this sound simple? Yes, it is not complicated for many plants, but hybrid rice has always been a global problem. There are hundreds of rice grains on a rice ear, and each rice grain is a rice flower before it is formed. Rice is a self-pollinating plant, and each rice flower has pistils and stamens. How to hybridize? Do you manually remove the stamens in each rice flower? Hybrid rice cannot be explained in one or two sentences, but it is clear how difficult and great this matter is.

With hybridization technology, humans can speed up the evolution process of plants, but before the emergence of hybridization technology, especially when people had just entered the agricultural civilization, everything depended on luck and they could only wait for spontaneous mutations of plants.

When it comes to spontaneous mutations in plants, we have to mention corn, because after the mutation, corn developed a characteristic that is extremely detrimental to its own continuation. A long time ago, corn was just a weed, and at a certain moment, a certain weed had a genetic mutation, and the mutated weed became an edible crop for humans. Its fruit, that is, the corn kernels, grew around the main stem, and the original hard shell outside the fruit disappeared, but at the same time, it also acquired a wonderful skill, that is, the corn kernels will not fall off the main stem after they mature.

Whether it is animals or plants, there are two most important things: one is survival, and the second is reproduction.

It is by adhering to these two things that species can continue and become better and better. However, the mutation of corn obviously violates the principle of "reproduction". The fruits of plants will not fall off by themselves, which will greatly increase the difficulty of reproduction. With such a mutation, it should only go to extinction, but corn has survived. Why is this? There is only one reason, that is coincidence. As soon as the mutation occurred, it was discovered by humans and became a crop for humans.

In fact, the ancient Indians began to grow corn more than 8,000 years ago. The evidence is the ancient Indian corn culture relics discovered during the archaeological process. According to the research of botanists, the mutation of corn occurred about 8,000 years ago.

So what plant did corn mutate from? This question has troubled scientists for a long time, and they finally locked their sights on the Mexican shrub and the friction grass, but they still couldn't determine which one it was. Later, molecular biology emerged, and through gene comparison, it was finally determined that the ancestor of corn was the Mexican shrub, and this weed still grows in the Americas today. This is actually a very surprising thing, because from the appearance, the Mexican shrub has basically nothing to do with corn. It is hard to imagine that just a few gene mutations can bring such a huge change to the external properties of the plant. Nature is really amazing.

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