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Fascinating historical science, twice over—how Native peoples over millennia engaged in sciences of agricultural experimentation and exchange on a hemispheric scale. Corn didn't just radiate out from Mexico; it returned improved from South America. 1/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-of-natural-history/2020/12/14/how-ancient-dna-unearths-corns-maize-ing-history/#.X9zDOpqNdGs.twitter
"this backflow of South American genetic material may have contributed to the development of a more productive staple ... related to the growth & aggregation of human populations, & the formation of more complex social & political structures" 2/ https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/12/09/2015560117
Early maize cobs in Mexico were small, & slowly got larger. Outside their original range Native peoples (in the Southwest) cultivated shorter growing season varieties & (in the Andes) got them absolutely massive. Mixed genetic strains created crop diversity (& thus stability) 3/
The genome mapping here is so interesting - good science. And it's good science that sits atop the many places where Native peoples in the Americas took a cultivar, made it better, and created the cornerstones of what is now our global food supply. 4/
Which makes me think about Moray, an Inca site near Cusco, whose ringed terraces have been discussed as showing temperature variations as you go down, leading some to believe it was an ag experiment station for improving crops. 5/
(that's an argument that has been reproduced so much that some of the original scholarship explaining it has been clipped off. See the work of John Earl and Irene Silverblatt and their collaborators in the comunidad of Sarhua: https://www.academia.edu/259515/La_Realidad_F%C3%ADsica_Y_Social_En_La_Cosmolog%C3%ADa_Andina ) 6/
All of which is to say - places like Moray, and peoples like the Inca (or, better put, the Andean communities that for millennia preceded them) are as important for our present reality than any centuries-old monastery or university in Europe. Moreso. 7/
It's also goddamn gorgeous - a work of almost modernist art, marrying its science to a reverence for weather, seasons, the stars, the earth. One of my two favorite places in the southern Andes that's not Machu Picchu. 8/8
