1:05 1 Billion Tons Farmed Every Year! 2:18 Corn and Maize are the same thing. 2:57 Wheat 🌾 7:59 Teosinte 10:43 Maize has Variety 🌽 14:25 Spread of Maize 🌽 15:49 Maize Pollen 🌽 18:33 Olmec Praise of Maize 🌽
My father's hometown, Coxcatlan, is located in the Tehuacan valley. They nicknamed the town "La cuna del maize," translating to the birthplace of Maize. I use to hear stories as a kid about the archeologists who visited and stayed next door to my grandma's house, and the relevance of the town and the near by archeological sites, but I didn't think much of it as a kid. Now, I am older and able to understand these scientific findings, I am proud of my roots and their accomplishments, which will be in the annals of humanity.
I grew up in central Indiana. Even as late as 2004, one of the most common first jobs for kids in the summer was maize de-tasseling. There are machines that can do it faster, but many farmers still reserve sections of their fields for children to work and "grow character."
I worked as a produce clerk for 5 years. Every summer we got dumptruck loads of corn everyday. One of us would be sacrificed and confined to the corn cave where we would take the raw corn and shuck it and package it or 80% shuck it so it looks all purty for displays. If corn shucking was a sport I would be like the Andre Agassi. I don't have anything enlightening to add I just want brag that my shucking abilities are freakish.
@@JozefLucifugeKorzeniowski - Dunno why it isn't a sport. Probably just no one has organized it yet. After all, they have "sheep to shawl" competitions, why not corn shucking?
Central Indiana Hoosier here too. It's always been so incredible to me how the most recent maximum glacial extent lines up almost exactly with the prominence of corn. Like, in northern Morgan county just south of Indy, it's ALL cornfields going south until you hit the big moraine, and then it's mostly still forested. Is maize more adapted to postglacial soils because of its origins in the high mountain valleys of Mexico? Or is it just the postglacial flatness? Or a little of both?
@@Connie.T. - bear in mind that I suck at botany. So far as I know, the current maize farming in central Indiana and Illinois is primarily related to the post glacial flatlands. Central Indiana (Marion, Delaware and surrounding counties) are mostly wetlands, and require constant drainage to keep them from flooding; they're actually not that great for farming maize. To the best of my knowledge, the soil is rich and the land is flat, and all we need to do os keep out those pesky flood waters to keep the grain flowing. It's somewhat easier upstate, where the water table is lower before you get to the Great Lakes. I know Cahokia primarily thrived on the maize trade, and there an 800 hectare site just north of Lake Ontario that was 80%+ fed on maize, but soil quality may not be as much of a factor as is currently thought, if these numbers are accurate.
Fun fact, after its arrival in Eastern Europe, maize became the staple grain of Romania, as it was hardier than wheat. Not only that, but beans and squash also became quite important crops over here, especially beans.
My Dad and Mom were born in Chernovitz, now in the Ukraine. If I can't eat Mamaliga and buttermilk, it not worth living. Saw this and thought of Grampa, and made some after the Romania comment. It's boiled potatoes, almost soft then covered with corn meal, and when served a bit a lot of browned onions. Leftovers are fried in the morning, with eggs, shredded beef. And Mom changed it a bit, she got a white bean that boiled soft almost as fast as the potatoes took, so there was a bit of bean in her version. That bean came from Romania, and my sister still grows it, pole bean, picked young great as a green bean dish.
I’m from Colombia originally. As a kid, I remember my grandmother making “arepas” early in the morning in a colonial village called Oiba in the Colombian Andes. She would soak maize and then grind it. I always did wonder why she would add ashes from her wood burning stove to the mix. I now understand I was observing the process of Nixtamalization. So awesome 👏
@@dennisjohnsen7297 Hey Dennis, I am going to let you in on a big secret, but I trust you won't spill the BEANS and start telling everyone! The title of this presentation is: "MAIZE: The Engine of American Civilization". So this is not about BEANS, but about CORN.
Corn being a calorie powerhouse today is testament of how insanely OP the knowledge of the pre-contact American cultures was. Not only was corn slowly bred into a staple food from a weird grass, they also figured out that planting it alongside beans and squash would feed them AND the soil biology. The brutes ended up prevailing, it seems…
Truly thankful and appreciative for all the best crops Indigenous americans engineered. They are an incredible variety of peoples who need much more recognition and support globally.
My highschool science teacher once told me that humans rely on three crops to live of which corn is at the top of, the other two is rice and wheat. He said that if one of those crops failed from climate, disease whatever we'd get biblical levels of starvation.... That's always stuck with me.
wheat fuckin sucks tho. the mediterranean/european crop package really was like, the worst among places that developed agriculture. it took until the 1870s for industrial British wheat fields to produce more per hectare than medieval Haudenosaunee maize gardens did
No, we'll not starve if we have barley, oats, potatoes, and beans. I eliminated modern corn, wheat, and rice from our diet and we are doing fine. Traditionally grown and processed masa is fine, wheat flour is not.
From what I understand Maize led to population booms in Africa and Europe soon after its introduction to those areas. The "New World" crops of: potatoes, tomatoes, maize, chilis, squash, and certain beans continue to feed the world.
Absolutely! The world would be so impoverished without new world crops. (Imagine Italian food without tomatoes!). The potato alone is responsible to for surges in the global population.
@@AncientAmericas The current population owes a ton of gratitude to Native American farmers....of course its not all rainbows and unicorns...they did introduce everyone to tobacco :)
As a Mexican, I am full guilty of being a 'corn'ivore, no regrets, nor shame! I'm grown up on tortillas for bread. This fine body is all proof of it. In cold weather, mother makes, Atole. A warm substance of milk and corn mill with cinnamon and sugar in perfect consistentcy between liquid and concentrated. Yummy! Tamales, Chilaquiles, Enchiladas, etc. I can go on and on. Nixtamalization is exactly a process my grandmother did. It would take a whole day for that process to be completed. Thereafter, grandma would take the 'soft' corn kernels to grind into mill on a metate, a stone grinder, similar to how guacamole is often presented in. That guacamole stone thing is molcajete. Alas, it's an out of 'style', or outdated, process now over modern more efficacious and time saving automation methods. I'm hungry, I'm gonna go make me some Sopes.
I was saving up for this one, and was delighted! Well done! Milpa agriculture is one of my favorite aspects of the Mesoamerican lifestyle. We rented a one-room house in Guatemala, and our landlady had a milpa outside our backdoor. Besides the symbiosis of the "three sisters" (which IMHO should include the episode-worthy chiles and tomatoes), these foods, except for tomatoes, don't need daily maintenance and at the end of the season can begin to cure in the garden without an urgent need for harvesting. In our highland community, once the milpa is planted, sprouted, and well established, people migrate to the coffee plantations on the Pacific coast. Women and small children stay home to do minimal maintenance, and to harvest as needed the more perishable crops like tomatoes. At the end of the rainy season in October, coffee work on the coast is done and everyone is back home in time for Todos Santos (Nov 1), and a leisurely harvest, threshing, drying and storage of the maize, beans, squashes and chiles. The corn plant itself provides fodder for the family hog, and the straight stalks have many uses as cane. The ground cover provided by the squashes inhibits weeds and protects the soil, but even so, many wild herbs pop up and are allowed to naturalize. While collecting language data, a few local coworkers and I walked through our milpa on a day after the milpa had been harvested and cleaned up. Even in it's relatively clean state, my friends identified 30 species of native plants, and listed their practical uses, e.g. medicine, cooking, soap, twine, fiber, and animal feed, all accomplished ostensibly to grow maize.
Corn and Potatoes shook the world. As much impact as wheat, and almost as much impact as rice. Once Europeans got a hold of it, the playing field shifted and suddenly populations could be fed at a fraction of the effort.
@@MrRedberd .... “Europeans destroyed ....” Europeans had lived in close proximity to each other for thousands of years. They exchanged cultures which included: food, religion, clothing, technology, science & antibodies to viruses. Europeans were not strangers to their own plagues. They inadvertently nearly wiped out their own lives because of the Black Death, and other plagues. The peoples of the Americas were isolated. They shared those same things amongst themselves, but they had no other outside influences to modify their lives. They lived in a bubble. It was nearly impossible for them to grow and change as a people - or keep up with technology that was advancing outside of their bubble. They need Europeans to come. I do not excuse the Spaniards for their imposed cultural dispersion, nor for their enslavement and rape of Meso-American people & resources. But I will lessen its horror by saying this: the Mexica, and the other tribes around them were no strangers to rape, pillage, and human sacrifice. If they had the technology to “discover” Europe then the same thing would have happened in reverse. All people suck. We are naive if we attribute only the best qualities to people that are more similar to us and ignore their failings. There is a special place in hell for the Spaniards - but within shouting distance is a place for those that sacrificed humans daily to keep their gods happy.
@@memowilliam9889 I wouldn't say the indigenous populations in the Americas needed to meet the Europeans...but I agree with everything else you said. It was the cruelness of the Aztec empire that allowed the Spaniards to make allies against them. No doubt the Aztecs would've done a number on Neolithic Europeans, if they could've.
@@MrRedberd … I stand by my assertion that the meso-Americans needed them to come. However, more accurately they needed them to share the best of their culture and not to dominate, enslave, and force conversion.
well I can tell you why I don't watch many of them, despite having a voracious interest in the subject. the main reason is that I find this channel to be a little bit overzealous with competitively biased academic claims, presenting them in a way as though they aren't remotely considered controversial by anyone. for example in this very video there are a couple of occasions where it is directly and indirectly suggested that maize was the first domesticated crop by human beings on the planet. a quotation from a historian from another youtube channel who speaks very well with an authority that I trust, "everyone wants their own special civilization to be first but evidence is lacking everywhere". this presenter is very careful to be specific when something is a hypothesis, when something is controversial, or when a recent claim or old claim alike might possibly be dubious and why, regardless of his personal feelings on what he wants to be true. this is how a good historian behaves, and this isn't the kind of behavior I see on this channel, though he isn't outright terrible like some presenters are. a more minor reason is I see modern political bias bleeding at the edges of this video, which is always ugly when covering historical/anthropological subjects. it's not bad how it is on some channels, but an example in this very video is when he refers to "the people who study the subject" in reference to genetics while showing a picture of two females stereotypically holding vials of liquid as EMpOWered SceiencEITists, and then goes on to talk about the two men who led hypotheses in the field. constructive criticism, I hope he reads it.
ikr! like i couldn't understand how octavian and marc anthony were arguing about the corn shipments from egypt until i was reading this book on linguistics by mario pei and i learned corn generally referred to wheat in england or oats in scotland. what you just said clarifies it for me even further. thank you
Lord have mercy I'm two years late but here goes. I'm an Appalachian American from East Tennessee; of Indo-European, Mediterranean, and Sub-Saharan African descent. Our cuisine features a lot of corn/maize as well. I'm overall a maize fanatic, I love that stuff. It's so versatile for anything.
Corn, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, chiles, peppers, cabbages, lettuce, carrots, guacamole, avocado, and pumpkins some of the finest examples of vegetables, plants, fruits, with some seeds and nuts
Ok first off half of those come not from America, and you have 3 things listed 2x but under a different name for same thing…. But yes a lot of those are delicious foods
@@marcoslopez5795 look tomatoes and potatoes are delicious but there’s a lot more food out there, the whole world actually. What do you eat french fries and ketchup?
I'm from Peru. When I was a child, my grandparents used to prepare Sara t'anta, that is a maize bread in quechua language. They're from the northern Andean zone of Peru, where the Huamachuco civilization developed
You should consider producing several episodes on the Mapuche. They lived in Chile when the Spniards arrived. They were initially conquered, but in southern Chile successfully revolted. They used Spanish horses and cattle to take up a pastoral lifestyle. They crossed the Andes isto the Pampas, and established a nation which extended from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and worked their way norte until at least the Chaco and the Pantanal, where they completely dominated the other tribes in the regional. They fought the Spaniards
Sorry, I sent this before I finished. My phone corrects to Portuguese spelling, which makes everything more difficult. The Mapuche fought the Europeans to a standstill for around 300 years, a feat no other Amerindian group ever managed. They were only defeated after the American Civil War, with the invention of the Winchester rifle. As long as their opponents used muzzle-loaded firearms, they were unbeatable.. In the late 1800s, the Argentines, under their dictator Rosas, waged a war of extermination against them. As did the Chileans on the Pacific coast. The survivors went on to play an important role in the war against Paraguay, and became the original Gaúchos, an extremely important cultural influence in modern Argentina and Southern Brazil. As the most warlike and successful Amerindians of all, I feel that they should be commemorated.
The ancient wandering tribes were used to eating the seeds of grasses. Those that they could keep down and provided some nutrition were noted for future consumption when passing thru the next year. They figure that some gathered seeds were dropped at a seasonal camp where that grass wasn't present and discovered when they returned the following year. That's when they wised up to the fact that it could be planted and grown where ever they wanted, so started sowing it where needed. Before corn was domesticated, the natives in North America relied on wild rice that grew in the marshes around the Great Lakes region and parts of Canada, Indian rice grass in the west and buckwheat, which wasn't a grass but was edible, including the seeds.
When I was in sixth grade, an archaeologist came into my school to talk about the nearby Effigy Mounds and local archaeology. He was impressed with my curiosity and my questions, so he gave me a few cobs of the maize derived from ancient varieties, individual kernal husks and everything. I grew up on a vegetable farm, so I was anxiously awaiting spring so I could plant my own ancient maize patch. When I opened up my tub in the spring, though, I found that mice had chewed through the plastic and eaten all of the kernals. I never got to plant my maize patch. Make sure to keep your seeds in airtight and thick plastic containers. Thank you for the video, I really enjoyed it. It is good to know there are other Midwesterners out there that care about pre-Columbian history as much as you do, so that I can keep learning. One specific praise, I liked that you took the effort to contextualize the information for people unfamiliar. That was a good touch.
I was shown a picture of my grandfather standing in front of cornstalks that seemed to be at least twice his height. Breeding of corn since those times of the late 19th/early 20th century has put more emphasis on the size of the ears rather than the stalk.
I started watching this wondering how good a video about corn 🌽 could be, and it turns out a video about corn can be extremely interesting! I feel like I've learned way more about corn than even knew was possible! Really great 👏👏👏👏👏
Excellent video! I’m tempted to go with my initial assessment that as a California Mountain boy, Corn played a very minimal role in my life - and the first thing that comes to mind is what ethanol has done to all of my two strokes. But then, honestly, every time I put ketchup on a hot dog, and popcorn I ate, anything that utilizes high fructose corn syrup for sweetening has been in my life thanks to corn. From my vantage point, corn is low-key, but it is all over the place, and this year for the first time I’ll be growing it in my vegetable garden along with bush beans and corn will provide many calories for the coming years sustenance. Europeans were much more wheat dependent, but corn is in our lives here in America and it is here to stay.
I found something surprising when I tried to grow a standard kind of sweet corn in an area with too much shade and poor soil -- it produced seeds early, that looked just like teocinte, with the same single line of small kernels of alternating directions. I suspect the maize genome still has some real versatility left despite millennia of selective breeding.
Amazing how maize remains the staple of Mexican (my ancestral) cuisine today, nixtamalized and turned into masa, just as our native grandmothers have been doing it for thousands of years.
And some of its most common spices. Peppers define human cuisine in so many cultures on every continent except Antarctica. But they only came from the Americas.
Wow, i love the domestication and selective breeding part. This is really nice. Its putting the symbiotic and evolutionary relationship of plants and humans under a different lens for me Its almost as if plants like to be bred for desirable characters/qualities Thank you
Corn, along with the nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, chiles), complete and profoundly changed the cuisines around the world. It would be impossible to feed the world without them. And isn't ironic that the Europeans were trying to get to Asia to get spices, but the spicy fruit of chile plants ended up being central to modern Thai and Chinese and Indian cuisines.
As an Illinoisan, it's so lovely to learn about the crop I've been drowning in my whole life. Thanks for doing what you do. I'm well on my way to binging the whole catalog and I'm much better for it.
"I may not be able to get much out of this grass, but I'm going to do my part and my grandchild or their grandchild will finally get something important out of this."
It makes you wonder if there was a mad scientist who made great strides in development each season, but how much can be done in one lifetime? Did he have a linage of mad scientist farmers that passed down the art? At some point, it seems to have became common practice for every farmer to pick out the best seed for the next season. It had to start with one out-of-the-box thinking MF, with time on his hands. Everyone else is like, "Why are you planting grass?"
“Humans grow maize and maize grows humans” mind blown! O_O I never thought of myself as a crop. No wonder mezo Americans would do sacrifices, the corn needs to harvest its crops too lol
Listening to this video while sorting through and doing selection for my landrace corn breeding project makes me feel incredibly connected to the long line of maize farmers that have gotten us to this point, and to the incredible journey this plant has taken to get to where we are today. Absolutely amazing video!
Another most interesting episode. Being, as I am, from Bourbon County KY, I must add that maize in its distilled form of whiskey became one of the more important products of the European migrants. I might also add that in my studies I came across some interesting information concerning the South American maize based beer. It was so sought after by the peoples of that area where it was used, that villages would compete to be allowed to work on the various projects proposed by the rulers. After all, those rulers had access to the best brews, and so could provide their workers with those beverages. In some of the buildings that housed those workers, niches were found along the walls. They were initially thought to be spots to house images of local deities More recently, they are thought to have actually been repositories for containers of that maize beer. Sorry I don't have the source of that info to hand. If I can find it in my library, I will pass it along. .
I've heard in a video on Gobekli Tepe that beer was brewed in rock depressions, from the grains that grew wild on the hills around the site. Could be the entice ment of this rare brew was part of the offering for labor to help build this first " tavern ".
The frontier farmers turned their corn into whiskey since they got a higher price for their crop when reduced to a more easily transported liquid form.
I do not know how I missed this. I was talking to a friend of mine about this very subject. He has an agricultural biologist degree from Penn state and worked with his county's agricultural extension agency as a field nutrition consultant. one of his maters was on maize. what he found interesting in his studies was that the maize found in north east US had totally different properties than what the maize in the south west us had. what he also did was study the properties of the maize as it migrated with humans from west to east. the properties slowly changed over the years. while the maize of the SW was drought resistant and could take plenty of sun, the maize of the NE was more shade tolerant, while all the variants in-between showed traits favorable to the areas that it was grown in. one thing that was not lost on the indigenous tribes of Middle and North America was he use of cross pollination to try and get more favorable strain of a certain crop. I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the gist of it.
@@AncientAmericas i just joined your Patreon too so I shouldn't miss much. I'm more interested in North America, but there is much to be learned from the other southern cultures as well.
Recall visiting open markets in Arequipa, Peru and being amazed by all the vegetable varieties. Potatoes and other tubers were in abundance as was maize.
i believe the mayans, aztecs, olmecs and every other early american civilization knew so much more than what european man can ever credit. The mayas were no strangers to astronomy and mathematics so I wouldn't be surprised if they also were not strangers to bio engineering along with.
Well, DNA testing on several skulls in that region proves Europeans built the megalithic structures there. Plus Spanish explorers found white people living in the region. But, HEY...facts are racist.
The fact that maize is called corn in English confused me so much when I was learning English because to me corn only referred to cereal grains and maize is called majs in Danish.
From Acapulco and went to Chiapas y talking to a mayan farmer show me a maìz, with all this diferent colors white, red,black, yellow. it look like it was make in a computer, beutifull.
Excellent! I have a copy that very book on my shelf. For anyone wanting a good overview of the pre-columbian americas, it's a fantastic and easy to read book.
It should be noted that maize chicha required the saliva from individuals that had the genetic factor to break down the starch into maltose, which allowed for fermentation.
Yes, I have read that. I've always assumed its why the Sapa Inca got his chicha prepared by the most beautiful women in the empire. Can't just have any peasant spitting into that stuff.
As a part aztec and mexican american, I am glad I got recommended this. My fantasy story is heavily Mesoamerican inspired and I always loved learning the history of civilizations. Tenochtitlan was a unique city-state, kind of like Maize was a unique crop.. I am surprised that this video made me constantly go ‘oh, that is unique.’ Or ‘oh so it is not like (insert common food staple here)’. I am saving this video for my sources. Also, it is ‘nawatl’ at 12:25, not ‘nahatl’. you were close. I actually got corrected by a professor so I learned this and my pride was destroyed for like, a day 🤣. I think you got niztamalization right though.
The other thing the professor should have told you is that never in History has a civilization called the aztecs has existed and that it was made up word by a European archeologist lol Mexico is already starting to correct this mis identification of our ancestors and I love that. Next time call yourself of Mexica ancestry is you are of "aztec" decent. Mexica is what they actually called themselves. I learned this while researching my ancestors cause I had to write a paper about them in college lol ofcourse there is more to the story. But in short Aztec is a made up name by a European.
I'm from Chile, and we call it Choclo When I was a kid, I remember each corn plant with a bean plant wrapped around its lower section, filled with red pods Since those vegetables are cooked together it seemed a practical way of growing them
Nice video! Im Hopi from my fathers side & the whole culture/religion evolves around corn. A lot of the Hopi clans origins say they migrated to Arizona from Mexico. Ashes are added to almost every Hopi dish that involves corn/corn meal.
Actually even in wild teosinte the similarities exist - the grain shape in somewhat similar to maize more so than to other grasses. It is the number and arrangement of grains which differs
@@AncientAmericas please keep doing you and making these videos and I hope to someday meet you irl and discuss these topics with you. Until may god be with you and #G.S. will always be here
Nixtamalization is how you get hominy. From hominy comes corn meal and grits, both American dietary staples of long standing. You use nixtamalization on field corn. Sweet corn you can eat fresh, which is what boiling corn and frozen corn come from. Many Europeans still think of corn as animal fodder, both because they don't have sweet corn and because they still don't understand nixtamalization. I'm lucky in coming from California. Not only were corn meal, corn flour and corn grits common, but so are tortillas and their base tamal, aka tamal flour or paste, which you make everything else from. Everything from tamales to corn chips. There've been very few days in my life where I haven't eaten corn and potatoes. With the heavy Asian influence here don't even get me started pn rice.
Love your videos, you seem to be very proficient at teaching. I would not be lying if I said that I was very suprised at how you are not more popular (as the quality is surely there), and I would like to personally thank you (for whatever its worth) for the great content you are creating. You have the qualities of a great historian, including a sense of objectivity, a contagious enthusiasm, and the confidence to say when the sources are just not there instead of presenting some unfounded claim.
The growing of corn at least in mesoamerica was also helped by the chinampas, which is a great piece of agricultural technology and you should do a video on it.
Corn saved many northern Italian farmers from starvation through the invention of polenta, but it also condemned them to be always harrowed with pellagra, since they didn't know nixtamalization. So, my feelings about corn are conflicted, actually. BTW the same word "pellagra" comes from Italian.
If you nixtamalize corn, it does more than make maize more nutritious, it actually makes the corn taste better. (Roast corn on the cob always tastes better than boiled I say. Props to my ancestors.)
It's interesting how much we have in common food wise across the world. I found out researching my Breton heritage that buckwheat was an important crop in France. It was introduced in the 16th century and even though its output was irregular it wasn't being taxed. Buckwheat grows on infertile or acidic soil and can be harvested three months after sowing. Of course I had to mention "galettes bretonnes" or simply galettes which is a buckwheat flour crepe (pancake). I've read that the Netherlands, Belgium, India, and Nepal had a similar dish.
12:50 this is so interesting, in my Mohawk class we were talking about what we'd all had for breakfast and my prof mentioned he usually eats either poridge or a similar Mohawk dish where you put the grain in wood ash water, now I know why that's done. Very cool that these methods are still used today, humans are so ingenious.
Another excelent video my friend!, maybe you can make another video about other american crops, like amarant, a favorite here in México and nahuatl people
With maize being so awesome it sucks to be allergic to it. Fun fact though: corn syrup is so heavily processed that even with a corn allergy corn syrup doesn't have the same gastrically-distressing effects.
@@AncientAmericas thank you for the very quick reply. This isn't the first time you've done this for me. You're the only large TH-camr I've seen reply to so many comments.
It would require a whole entire volume in books to name and describe all of the strictly American food plants, fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, esc. That were known to and used by the Ancient Americans. Prominent amount them are the various snap beans, Lima beans, squashes, pumpkins, water melons, peppers, egg plants, tomatoes, white and sweet potatoes, cassava, pineapples, strawberries, avocados, arrowroot, cashews, cacao, cranberries, papaya, peanuts, Jerusalem Artichokes 👁️, pecan nut, Brazil nuts, blackberries, blueberries, and esc. Over 80 percent of the World food crops are indigenous and orginal to the Americas.
Amazing info. Thank you so, so much for your work. I look forward tot he chance of using (and duly crediting) your work for teaching about aboriginal peoples from America.
I'm one of the lucky ones, born in a jacal en la labor vieja en la Hacienda la Escondida right on the river San Juan. Im almost 80 now but still clearly remember the reverance and love my grandfather had for his land and his maize.
So the three sisters or milpa would be incredibly efficient into maintaining a high soil quality, specially when combined with chinampas. They would add chilli peppers to deter pests. An understanding to their whole harvesting systems and an application of it in the Americas could have saved us from global warming.
@@AncientAmericas and I like yours, I seriously devoured all your content twice all over, we need more of this! America has a story with full on marvellous accomplishments. If you know of #VSauce (of course you do... every TH-cam does) it doesn’t serve us well as humans and specially as Continental American to neglect this continents history.
@@ajmentel2453 can you imagine Mexico implementing cultural landscapes just like the rice paddies in the Philippines that would no only look fantastic but all would act as a natural cooler and a home for so many endemic animals and pants that got displaced by the largest city in the world. Also I think it would hold the ground to prevent the ever sinking of the city.
me when Ancient Americas uploads content: liked, subscribed, added to favorites, telling my friends about it me when Ancient Americas makes puns: disliked, unfollowed, blocked, reported to TH-cam, lodged a complaint to the FCC, denounced to the International Criminal Court
I heard a lecture in college about it being a catastrophic sex hormone mutation that led to the dispersion problem and some ancient person saw it and was the first propagator of it. Thank you who ever you were. I love a good buttermilk pone.
Thanks! Michael Coe wrote a whole book on the history of chocolate. Once I get my hands on it, I'm sure I'll do an episode on cacao. But that's probably in the distant future.
@@AncientAmericas m.th-cam.com/channels/HH-ybUwH1CfJrXxnqw6Ljw.html This the archive channel for the podcast. EFAP is a film criticism and video response podcast. They’re famous for their extremely long streams. During their streams, they tend to pause the video that they are responding to often, thus the name “Every Frame A Pause.” During Episode 147, your video was mentioned in passing by a cohost, and he recommended it to the audience. The EFAP community members usually leave a comment to support the creator of the video in the algorithm. Yours was a fascinating video, and I’m sure that EFAP sent you quite a few new fans.
Thanks to the Indigenous population of the Americas, who for thousands of years of observation Hybridization manipulation and modification of Crops, also terrains using Rocks, Aqueduct and Terrazas, implement int the use of Fire to manage Forrested areas, Savannas and such, (they were the truly master Genetist of ancient times,) Thanks to all their achievements the world today can enjoy so many Crops like Maize, Sunflowers, Rubber/Latex, Potatoes, Batatas , Yucca/Cassava, Peanut, Avocado, Beans, Chilis, tomatoes, Agave, Squash, Papaya, Cacao/Chocolate, Chia, Dragon fruit (Pitahaya) Pineapple, Quinoa, Amaranth plus many other "exotic" fruits/Crops that didn't leave the continent of America (not to be Confused with 🇺🇲) or didn't create a huge impact to the world like the other crops, many of those unknown crops fruits are prevalent today in the palate of Latinoaméricanos of the many different kinds and races like, Afrodescendents, indigenous, Asians, Caucasians and the combination of all these different "races", living in these Vast lands... Example: Nances, Açai, Quenepas, Jocotes, Yaca, Guanabana, Níspero, Zapotes, Cactus/Tuna and the list is Huge, you just need to go to a local Market in towns or cities in any countries of the Americas. And you will be astonished. Try Peru, Bolivia or Central de Abastos Market in Mexico City for example. Saludos from a Nicaragüense 👋👋👋
I had the privilege to go on the Ute reservation and explore several cliff dwellings. There are 800-1000 year old corn cobs that were so tiny. Now I know why. I recommend to anyone the Ute Mountain Tribal Park if you are near Mesa Verde. Much better than the National Park.
Fact based AND entertaining is such a wonderful thing. Kudos to you for this quality content. Keep up the good work! Just FYI, The Algorithm sent me from my recommended. All Hail The Algorithm :)
@@AncientAmericas Isn't that the truth!!! But she has thrown a few interesting creators into my mix: Beau of the 5th Column (thoughts/current events), Robert Fuller (artist/British wildlife cams), your awesome archeology channel, and more!!! 🍀✌️😸🦋
1:05 1 Billion Tons Farmed Every Year!
2:18 Corn and Maize are the same thing.
2:57 Wheat 🌾
7:59 Teosinte
10:43 Maize has Variety 🌽
14:25 Spread of Maize 🌽
15:49 Maize Pollen 🌽
18:33 Olmec Praise of Maize 🌽
Thanks!
aMAIZEing
Maze and Maize are the same thing too!
My father's hometown, Coxcatlan, is located in the Tehuacan valley. They nicknamed the town "La cuna del maize," translating to the birthplace of Maize. I use to hear stories as a kid about the archeologists who visited and stayed next door to my grandma's house, and the relevance of the town and the near by archeological sites, but I didn't think much of it as a kid. Now, I am older and able to understand these scientific findings, I am proud of my roots and their accomplishments, which will be in the annals of humanity.
Your roots? Aaaa, I see what you did there. 😂🌽
(Corn roots btw)
I grew up in central Indiana. Even as late as 2004, one of the most common first jobs for kids in the summer was maize de-tasseling. There are machines that can do it faster, but many farmers still reserve sections of their fields for children to work and "grow character."
I worked as a produce clerk for 5 years. Every summer we got dumptruck loads of corn everyday. One of us would be sacrificed and confined to the corn cave where we would take the raw corn and shuck it and package it or 80% shuck it so it looks all purty for displays. If corn shucking was a sport I would be like the Andre Agassi. I don't have anything enlightening to add I just want brag that my shucking abilities are freakish.
@@JozefLucifugeKorzeniowski - Dunno why it isn't a sport. Probably just no one has organized it yet. After all, they have "sheep to shawl" competitions, why not corn shucking?
Central Indiana Hoosier here too. It's always been so incredible to me how the most recent maximum glacial extent lines up almost exactly with the prominence of corn. Like, in northern Morgan county just south of Indy, it's ALL cornfields going south until you hit the big moraine, and then it's mostly still forested. Is maize more adapted to postglacial soils because of its origins in the high mountain valleys of Mexico? Or is it just the postglacial flatness? Or a little of both?
@@Connie.T. - bear in mind that I suck at botany. So far as I know, the current maize farming in central Indiana and Illinois is primarily related to the post glacial flatlands. Central Indiana (Marion, Delaware and surrounding counties) are mostly wetlands, and require constant drainage to keep them from flooding; they're actually not that great for farming maize. To the best of my knowledge, the soil is rich and the land is flat, and all we need to do os keep out those pesky flood waters to keep the grain flowing. It's somewhat easier upstate, where the water table is lower before you get to the Great Lakes.
I know Cahokia primarily thrived on the maize trade, and there an 800 hectare site just north of Lake Ontario that was 80%+ fed on maize, but soil quality may not be as much of a factor as is currently thought, if these numbers are accurate.
@@bordenfleetwood5773 thanks!!
Fun fact, after its arrival in Eastern Europe, maize became the staple grain of Romania, as it was hardier than wheat. Not only that, but beans and squash also became quite important crops over here, especially beans.
What is the most popular bean in Romania? In Texas the Pinto bean is tops.
My Dad and Mom were born in Chernovitz, now in the Ukraine.
If I can't eat Mamaliga and buttermilk, it not worth living.
Saw this and thought of Grampa, and made some after the Romania comment.
It's boiled potatoes, almost soft then covered with corn meal, and when served a bit a lot of browned onions.
Leftovers are fried in the morning, with eggs, shredded beef.
And Mom changed it a bit, she got a white bean that boiled soft almost as fast as the potatoes took, so there was a bit of bean in her version.
That bean came from Romania, and my sister still grows it, pole bean, picked young great as a green bean dish.
So now its romano-mexican food?
Tomatoes too
Corn is the guy she tells you not to worry about he has it all
I’m from Colombia originally. As a kid, I remember my grandmother making “arepas” early in the morning in a colonial village called Oiba in the Colombian Andes. She would soak maize and then grind it. I always did wonder why she would add ashes from her wood burning stove to the mix. I now understand I was observing the process of Nixtamalization. So awesome 👏
I love how the word is a mix of meso American and Latin/old French.
@@i8764theKevassitant”old French”???
I prefer bacon, eggs, and biscuits for breakfast. You can have your beans for breakfast!😁
@@dennisjohnsen7297 Hey Dennis, I am going to let you in on a big secret, but I trust you won't spill the BEANS and start telling everyone! The title of this presentation is: "MAIZE: The Engine of American Civilization". So this is not about BEANS, but about CORN.
@@Investigacions I don’t have any corn. Sorry. Maybe you should try your neighbor.
Corn being a calorie powerhouse today is testament of how insanely OP the knowledge of the pre-contact American cultures was.
Not only was corn slowly bred into a staple food from a weird grass, they also figured out that planting it alongside beans and squash would feed them AND the soil biology.
The brutes ended up prevailing, it seems…
Truly thankful and appreciative for all the best crops Indigenous americans engineered. They are an incredible variety of peoples who need much more recognition and support globally.
Agreed!
Outside of the Americas, you can also thank native Papuans for being the first cultivators and agriculturalists of bananas.
My highschool science teacher once told me that humans rely on three crops to live of which corn is at the top of, the other two is rice and wheat. He said that if one of those crops failed from climate, disease whatever we'd get biblical levels of starvation.... That's always stuck with me.
Very true.
Potato is also up there. Specially in harsh climates.
He forgot potatoes.
wheat fuckin sucks tho. the mediterranean/european crop package really was like, the worst among places that developed agriculture. it took until the 1870s for industrial British wheat fields to produce more per hectare than medieval Haudenosaunee maize gardens did
No, we'll not starve if we have barley, oats, potatoes, and beans. I eliminated modern corn, wheat, and rice from our diet and we are doing fine. Traditionally grown and processed masa is fine, wheat flour is not.
Came in as your average European Wheat enthusiast, came out as a proper Maize enjoyer.
Truly based and Maize-pilled.
From what I understand Maize led to population booms in Africa and Europe soon after its introduction to those areas.
The "New World" crops of: potatoes, tomatoes, maize, chilis, squash, and certain beans continue to feed the world.
Absolutely! The world would be so impoverished without new world crops. (Imagine Italian food without tomatoes!). The potato alone is responsible to for surges in the global population.
@@AncientAmericas The current population owes a ton of gratitude to Native American farmers....of course its not all rainbows and unicorns...they did introduce everyone to tobacco :)
@@danfarbecker2441 I enjoy a good cigar every now and then.
It took a while for the Europeans to start raising corn for human consumption. They also thought that tomatoes were poisonous.
@@billwilson3609 Plants in the nightshade family do a lot of harm to the human body.
As a Mexican, I am full guilty of being a 'corn'ivore, no regrets, nor shame!
I'm grown up on tortillas for bread. This fine body is all proof of it.
In cold weather, mother makes, Atole. A warm substance of milk and corn mill with cinnamon and sugar in perfect consistentcy between liquid and concentrated. Yummy!
Tamales, Chilaquiles, Enchiladas, etc. I can go on and on.
Nixtamalization is exactly a process my grandmother did.
It would take a whole day for that process to be completed. Thereafter, grandma would take the 'soft' corn kernels to grind into mill on a metate, a stone grinder, similar to how guacamole is often presented in. That guacamole stone thing is molcajete.
Alas, it's an out of 'style', or outdated, process now over modern more efficacious and time saving automation methods.
I'm hungry, I'm gonna go make me some Sopes.
Cornivore here in Tennessee,ate it daily in many ways, stay safe
STOP!!! You are making me SO hungry for great Mexican food! I'm a gringo, but... Maybe your family could adopt me?
Gringos (myself included) love corn'ivore food. We didn't get at the essence of it as well as our neighbors to the south.
little tubs of nixtamal are on sale in the local El Super store. It's a chemistry / cooking project I want to do some time.
This makes me think of how many grains are looked over that used to be cultivated. There are dozens in places like Italy that never leave the area.
I was saving up for this one, and was delighted! Well done! Milpa agriculture is one of my favorite aspects of the Mesoamerican lifestyle. We rented a one-room house in Guatemala, and our landlady had a milpa outside our backdoor. Besides the symbiosis of the "three sisters" (which IMHO should include the episode-worthy chiles and tomatoes), these foods, except for tomatoes, don't need daily maintenance and at the end of the season can begin to cure in the garden without an urgent need for harvesting. In our highland community, once the milpa is planted, sprouted, and well established, people migrate to the coffee plantations on the Pacific coast. Women and small children stay home to do minimal maintenance, and to harvest as needed the more perishable crops like tomatoes. At the end of the rainy season in October, coffee work on the coast is done and everyone is back home in time for Todos Santos (Nov 1), and a leisurely harvest, threshing, drying and storage of the maize, beans, squashes and chiles. The corn plant itself provides fodder for the family hog, and the straight stalks have many uses as cane. The ground cover provided by the squashes inhibits weeds and protects the soil, but even so, many wild herbs pop up and are allowed to naturalize. While collecting language data, a few local coworkers and I walked through our milpa on a day after the milpa had been harvested and cleaned up. Even in it's relatively clean state, my friends identified 30 species of native plants, and listed their practical uses, e.g. medicine, cooking, soap, twine, fiber, and animal feed, all accomplished ostensibly to grow maize.
Glad you enjoyed it! That sounds like a wonderful experience!
Corn and Potatoes shook the world. As much impact as wheat, and almost as much impact as rice. Once Europeans got a hold of it, the playing field shifted and suddenly populations could be fed at a fraction of the effort.
Yeah, Europeans destroyed the cultures that made corn and potatoes. Then corn and especially potatoes saved theirs.
@@MrRedberd
Pretty much western history
@@MrRedberd ....
“Europeans destroyed ....”
Europeans had lived in close proximity to each other for thousands of years. They exchanged cultures which included: food, religion, clothing, technology, science & antibodies to viruses.
Europeans were not strangers to their own plagues. They inadvertently nearly wiped out their own lives because of the Black Death, and other plagues.
The peoples of the Americas were isolated. They shared those same things amongst themselves, but they had no other outside influences to modify their lives. They lived in a bubble. It was nearly impossible for them to grow and change as a people - or keep up with technology that was advancing outside of their bubble. They need Europeans to come.
I do not excuse the Spaniards for their imposed cultural dispersion, nor for their enslavement and rape of Meso-American people & resources. But I will lessen its horror by saying this: the Mexica, and the other tribes around them were no strangers to rape, pillage, and human sacrifice. If they had the technology to “discover” Europe then the same thing would have happened in reverse.
All people suck. We are naive if we attribute only the best qualities to people that are more similar to us and ignore their failings.
There is a special place in hell for the Spaniards - but within shouting distance is a place for those that sacrificed humans daily to keep their gods happy.
@@memowilliam9889 I wouldn't say the indigenous populations in the Americas needed to meet the Europeans...but I agree with everything else you said. It was the cruelness of the Aztec empire that allowed the Spaniards to make allies against them. No doubt the Aztecs would've done a number on Neolithic Europeans, if they could've.
@@MrRedberd …
I stand by my assertion that the meso-Americans needed them to come.
However, more accurately they needed them to share the best of their culture and not to dominate, enslave, and force conversion.
Man seriously wondering how you haven't already got more subscribers, your vids are always so good
I'm not sweating it. I'm happy you're enjoying them!
Dude I totally agree
Too many bad puns.
Just got 1 more! Great stuff.
well I can tell you why I don't watch many of them, despite having a voracious interest in the subject. the main reason is that I find this channel to be a little bit overzealous with competitively biased academic claims, presenting them in a way as though they aren't remotely considered controversial by anyone. for example in this very video there are a couple of occasions where it is directly and indirectly suggested that maize was the first domesticated crop by human beings on the planet. a quotation from a historian from another youtube channel who speaks very well with an authority that I trust, "everyone wants their own special civilization to be first but evidence is lacking everywhere". this presenter is very careful to be specific when something is a hypothesis, when something is controversial, or when a recent claim or old claim alike might possibly be dubious and why, regardless of his personal feelings on what he wants to be true. this is how a good historian behaves, and this isn't the kind of behavior I see on this channel, though he isn't outright terrible like some presenters are. a more minor reason is I see modern political bias bleeding at the edges of this video, which is always ugly when covering historical/anthropological subjects. it's not bad how it is on some channels, but an example in this very video is when he refers to "the people who study the subject" in reference to genetics while showing a picture of two females stereotypically holding vials of liquid as EMpOWered SceiencEITists, and then goes on to talk about the two men who led hypotheses in the field. constructive criticism, I hope he reads it.
ikr! like i couldn't understand how octavian and marc anthony were arguing about the corn shipments from egypt until i was reading this book on linguistics by mario pei and i learned corn generally referred to wheat in england or oats in scotland. what you just said clarifies it for me even further. thank you
Ha! Yeah, I can see where that would be confusing.
Man, pre-colombian history is indded a great thing. I am from Brasil, and very glad of that channel!
Thank you!
Lord have mercy I'm two years late but here goes. I'm an Appalachian American from East Tennessee; of Indo-European, Mediterranean, and Sub-Saharan African descent. Our cuisine features a lot of corn/maize as well. I'm overall a maize fanatic, I love that stuff. It's so versatile for anything.
Corn, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, chiles, peppers, cabbages, lettuce, carrots, guacamole, avocado, and pumpkins some of the finest examples of vegetables, plants, fruits, with some seeds and nuts
Don't forget beans! A great majority of bean species came from the Americas.
And Chocolate.
Ok first off half of those come not from America, and you have 3 things listed 2x but under a different name for same thing…. But yes a lot of those are delicious foods
@@WhiteWolfeHU yeah the boring ones like cabbage and lettuce. The other delicious ones are from the americas
@@marcoslopez5795 look tomatoes and potatoes are delicious but there’s a lot more food out there, the whole world actually. What do you eat french fries and ketchup?
I'm from Peru. When I was a child, my grandparents used to prepare Sara t'anta, that is a maize bread in quechua language. They're from the northern Andean zone of Peru, where the Huamachuco civilization developed
You should consider producing several episodes on the Mapuche.
They lived in Chile when the Spniards arrived.
They were initially conquered, but in southern Chile successfully revolted.
They used Spanish horses and cattle to take up a pastoral lifestyle.
They crossed the Andes isto the Pampas, and established a nation which extended from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and worked their way norte until at least the Chaco and the Pantanal, where they completely dominated the other tribes in the regional.
They fought the Spaniards
Oh yes, I've got the mapuches on my list.
Sorry, I sent this before I finished.
My phone corrects to Portuguese spelling, which makes everything more difficult.
The Mapuche fought the Europeans to a standstill for around 300 years, a feat no other Amerindian group ever managed.
They were only defeated after the American Civil War, with the invention of the Winchester rifle.
As long as their opponents used muzzle-loaded firearms, they were unbeatable..
In the late 1800s, the Argentines, under their dictator Rosas, waged a war of extermination against them.
As did the Chileans on the Pacific coast.
The survivors went on to play an important role in the war against Paraguay, and became the original Gaúchos, an extremely important cultural influence in modern Argentina and Southern Brazil.
As the most warlike and successful Amerindians of all, I feel that they should be commemorated.
It still boggles my mind that someone 10,000s of years ago looked at some grass and decided that it
should be food, and created corn.
The ancient wandering tribes were used to eating the seeds of grasses. Those that they could keep down and provided some nutrition were noted for future consumption when passing thru the next year. They figure that some gathered seeds were dropped at a seasonal camp where that grass wasn't present and discovered when they returned the following year. That's when they wised up to the fact that it could be planted and grown where ever they wanted, so started sowing it where needed. Before corn was domesticated, the natives in North America relied on wild rice that grew in the marshes around the Great Lakes region and parts of Canada, Indian rice grass in the west and buckwheat, which wasn't a grass but was edible, including the seeds.
@@billwilson3609 maize was domesticated in south mexico not in the great lakes.
SORTOF!!
When I was in sixth grade, an archaeologist came into my school to talk about the nearby Effigy Mounds and local archaeology. He was impressed with my curiosity and my questions, so he gave me a few cobs of the maize derived from ancient varieties, individual kernal husks and everything. I grew up on a vegetable farm, so I was anxiously awaiting spring so I could plant my own ancient maize patch. When I opened up my tub in the spring, though, I found that mice had chewed through the plastic and eaten all of the kernals. I never got to plant my maize patch. Make sure to keep your seeds in airtight and thick plastic containers.
Thank you for the video, I really enjoyed it. It is good to know there are other Midwesterners out there that care about pre-Columbian history as much as you do, so that I can keep learning. One specific praise, I liked that you took the effort to contextualize the information for people unfamiliar. That was a good touch.
Thank you! Nice to see that there are other midwesterners who love learning about pre-columbian history!
My grandfather grew corn and beans in Mexico. I always loved going to the fields but it was tough tough work.
I was shown a picture of my grandfather standing in front of cornstalks that seemed to be at least twice his height. Breeding of corn since those times of the late 19th/early 20th century has put more emphasis on the size of the ears rather than the stalk.
woah 😮. I'm guessing he was all grown up?
Chickasaw/Cherokee/Tuscarora here. Your channel is a new discovery for me and I loving it as I consider pursuing an MA in History.
Thank you! Good luck pursuing your MA!
I started watching this wondering how good a video about corn 🌽 could be, and it turns out a video about corn can be extremely interesting!
I feel like I've learned way more about corn than even knew was possible!
Really great 👏👏👏👏👏
I'm so happy you found it interesting! This was my favorite episode to make so far and it makes me happy when other people appreciate it.
This is such a great channel. I love American archeology, so glad I could find a channel that talks about it without conspiracy theories
Thank you!
Q: Name a corny baseball player?
A: Willie Maize.
Excellent video! I’m tempted to go with my initial assessment that as a California Mountain boy, Corn played a very minimal role in my life - and the first thing that comes to mind is what ethanol has done to all of my two strokes. But then, honestly, every time I put ketchup on a hot dog, and popcorn I ate, anything that utilizes high fructose corn syrup for sweetening has been in my life thanks to corn. From my vantage point, corn is low-key, but it is all over the place, and this year for the first time I’ll be growing it in my vegetable garden along with bush beans and corn will provide many calories for the coming years sustenance. Europeans were much more wheat dependent, but corn is in our lives here in America and it is here to stay.
Whether we like or not, humanity is tied to corn.
I found something surprising when I tried to grow a standard kind of sweet corn in an area with too much shade and poor soil -- it produced seeds early, that looked just like teocinte, with the same single line of small kernels of alternating directions. I suspect the maize genome still has some real versatility left despite millennia of selective breeding.
Amazing how maize remains the staple of Mexican (my ancestral) cuisine today, nixtamalized and turned into masa, just as our native grandmothers have been doing it for thousands of years.
This is the first time I watched hard pore corn on TH-cam.
Wasn't it a-maize-ing?
Your puns are so corny
Did it excite your kernel passions?
Don't be euphemistic. We all saw the corn pone clip.
@@AncientAmericas Another good video, thanks I appreciate it! :D
Juancholoa here - man, you got some really really professional and methodically researched videos!
Thank you! I appreciate the compliment!
Been digging these ancient America videos, mesoamerican civilisations deserve more recognition
Thank you!
The americas may have lacked domesticated animals, but they cultivated 3 of the modern world's top staple foods: maize, potatoes, and tomatoes.
Don't forget Manioc (Cassava)!
@@AncientAmericas I guess I've let my european bias shimmer through there, lol
And some of its most common spices. Peppers define human cuisine in so many cultures on every continent except Antarctica. But they only came from the Americas.
They relied very heavily on slave labor so in a way they did have beasts of burden
I’m pretty sure the People that inhabited Peru domesticated Llamas and the people of Mexico domesticated burrows
Wow, i love the domestication and selective breeding part. This is really nice. Its putting the symbiotic and evolutionary relationship of plants and humans under a different lens for me
Its almost as if plants like to be bred for desirable characters/qualities
Thank you
You're welcome. Stick around for another crop episode later this year!
Corn, along with the nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, chiles), complete and profoundly changed the cuisines around the world. It would be impossible to feed the world without them.
And isn't ironic that the Europeans were trying to get to Asia to get spices, but the spicy fruit of chile plants ended up being central to modern Thai and Chinese and Indian cuisines.
As an Illinoisan, it's so lovely to learn about the crop I've been drowning in my whole life. Thanks for doing what you do. I'm well on my way to binging the whole catalog and I'm much better for it.
Thank you!
"I may not be able to get much out of this grass, but I'm going to do my part and my grandchild or their grandchild will finally get something important out of this."
It makes you wonder if there was a mad scientist who made great strides in development each season, but how much can be done in one lifetime? Did he have a linage of mad scientist farmers that passed down the art? At some point, it seems to have became common practice for every farmer to pick out the best seed for the next season. It had to start with one out-of-the-box thinking MF, with time on his hands. Everyone else is like, "Why are you planting grass?"
Talking about generational investment that was worth it
“Humans grow maize and maize grows humans” mind blown! O_O I never thought of myself as a crop. No wonder mezo Americans would do sacrifices, the corn needs to harvest its crops too lol
Corn tortillas! My all-time favorite bread.
Listening to this video while sorting through and doing selection for my landrace corn breeding project makes me feel incredibly connected to the long line of maize farmers that have gotten us to this point, and to the incredible journey this plant has taken to get to where we are today. Absolutely amazing video!
Thank you!
Another most interesting episode. Being, as I am, from Bourbon County KY, I must add that maize in its distilled form of whiskey became one of the more important products of the European migrants. I might also add that in my studies I came across some interesting information concerning the South American maize based beer. It was so sought after by the peoples of that area where it was used, that villages would compete to be allowed to work on the various projects proposed by the rulers. After all, those rulers had access to the best brews, and so could provide their workers with those beverages. In some of the buildings that housed those workers, niches were found along the walls. They were initially thought to be spots to house images of local deities More recently, they are thought to have actually been repositories for containers of that maize beer. Sorry I don't have the source of that info to hand. If I can find it in my library, I will pass it along. .
That is fascinating! Please let me know if you find the source.
I've heard in a video on Gobekli Tepe that beer was brewed in rock depressions, from the grains that grew wild on the hills around the site. Could be the entice ment of this rare brew was part of the offering for labor to help build this first " tavern ".
You can crush and ferment things like wild fruits and berries into some mighty fine wine. There`s a natural high alcohol yeast already on them.
The frontier farmers turned their corn into whiskey since they got a higher price for their crop when reduced to a more easily transported liquid form.
I do not know how I missed this. I was talking to a friend of mine about this very subject. He has an agricultural biologist degree from Penn state and worked with his county's agricultural extension agency as a field nutrition consultant. one of his maters was on maize. what he found interesting in his studies was that the maize found in north east US had totally different properties than what the maize in the south west us had. what he also did was study the properties of the maize as it migrated with humans from west to east. the properties slowly changed over the years. while the maize of the SW was drought resistant and could take plenty of sun, the maize of the NE was more shade tolerant, while all the variants in-between showed traits favorable to the areas that it was grown in. one thing that was not lost on the indigenous tribes of Middle and North America was he use of cross pollination to try and get more favorable strain of a certain crop. I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the gist of it.
All. Of. This. ^
@@AncientAmericas i just joined your Patreon too so I shouldn't miss much. I'm more interested in North America, but there is much to be learned from the other southern cultures as well.
Maize isnt native to the us tho. It was first domesticated in south mexico
@Andy López
Who said maize is native to the US?
Highest compliments on this truly fascinating and informative video.
Thank you!
Recall visiting open markets in Arequipa, Peru and being amazed by all the vegetable varieties. Potatoes and other tubers were in abundance as was maize.
i believe the mayans, aztecs, olmecs and every other early american civilization knew so much more than what european man can ever credit. The mayas were no strangers to astronomy and mathematics so I wouldn't be surprised if they also were not strangers to bio engineering along with.
The Maya had a VERY well developed math system for their time, even including some algebraic functions.
Well, DNA testing on several skulls in that region proves Europeans built the megalithic structures there. Plus Spanish explorers found white people living in the region. But, HEY...facts are racist.
The fact that maize is called corn in English confused me so much when I was learning English because to me corn only referred to cereal grains and maize is called majs in Danish.
From Acapulco and went to Chiapas y talking to a mayan farmer show me a maìz, with all this diferent colors white, red,black, yellow. it look like it was make in a computer, beutifull.
I've grown to appreciate the cornfields specially on a windy summer day, the sway and sound can be very pleasing.
Yes they are!
I discovered this channel after reading Charles C. Mann's Book 1491 and I am absolutely amazed. Great work!
Excellent! I have a copy that very book on my shelf. For anyone wanting a good overview of the pre-columbian americas, it's a fantastic and easy to read book.
It should be noted that maize chicha required the saliva from individuals that had the genetic factor to break down the starch into maltose, which allowed for fermentation.
Yes, I have read that. I've always assumed its why the Sapa Inca got his chicha prepared by the most beautiful women in the empire. Can't just have any peasant spitting into that stuff.
Lol
As a part aztec and mexican american, I am glad I got recommended this. My fantasy story is heavily Mesoamerican inspired and I always loved learning the history of civilizations. Tenochtitlan was a unique city-state, kind of like Maize was a unique crop.. I am surprised that this video made me constantly go ‘oh, that is unique.’ Or ‘oh so it is not like (insert common food staple here)’.
I am saving this video for my sources.
Also, it is ‘nawatl’ at 12:25, not ‘nahatl’. you were close. I actually got corrected by a professor so I learned this and my pride was destroyed for like, a day 🤣.
I think you got niztamalization right though.
The other thing the professor should have told you is that never in History has a civilization called the aztecs has existed and that it was made up word by a European archeologist lol Mexico is already starting to correct this mis identification of our ancestors and I love that. Next time call yourself of Mexica ancestry is you are of "aztec" decent. Mexica is what they actually called themselves. I learned this while researching my ancestors cause I had to write a paper about them in college lol ofcourse there is more to the story. But in short Aztec is a made up name by a European.
I'm from Chile, and we call it Choclo
When I was a kid, I remember each corn plant with a bean plant wrapped around its lower section, filled with red pods
Since those vegetables are cooked together it seemed a practical way of growing them
Great video, as usual! Would love to hear more about how maize helped transform the Haudenosanee into a militarized matriarchal society!
Someday we'll cover the Haudenosanee.
I am not sure matriarchal is correct.
Nice video! Im Hopi from my fathers side & the whole culture/religion evolves around corn. A lot of the Hopi clans origins say they migrated to Arizona from Mexico. Ashes are added to almost every Hopi dish that involves corn/corn meal.
Thank you!
Actually even in wild teosinte the similarities exist - the grain shape in somewhat similar to maize more so than to other grasses. It is the number and arrangement of grains which differs
I genuinely believe you’re doing a service for humanity by going over these topics.
Kudos to you.
Thank you!
@@AncientAmericas please keep doing you and making these videos and I hope to someday meet you irl and discuss these topics with you. Until may god be with you and #G.S. will always be here
Nixtamalization is how you get hominy. From hominy comes corn meal and grits, both American dietary staples of long standing. You use nixtamalization on field corn. Sweet corn you can eat fresh, which is what boiling corn and frozen corn come from. Many Europeans still think of corn as animal fodder, both because they don't have sweet corn and because they still don't understand nixtamalization.
I'm lucky in coming from California. Not only were corn meal, corn flour and corn grits common, but so are tortillas and their base tamal, aka tamal flour or paste, which you make everything else from. Everything from tamales to corn chips. There've been very few days in my life where I haven't eaten corn and potatoes. With the heavy Asian influence here don't even get me started pn rice.
Love your videos, you seem to be very proficient at teaching. I would not be lying if I said that I was very suprised at how you are not more popular (as the quality is surely there), and I would like to personally thank you (for whatever its worth) for the great content you are creating. You have the qualities of a great historian, including a sense of objectivity, a contagious enthusiasm, and the confidence to say when the sources are just not there instead of presenting some unfounded claim.
Thank you!
The growing of corn at least in mesoamerica was also helped by the chinampas, which is a great piece of agricultural technology and you should do a video on it.
I found this channel recently and Im absolutely impressed with your videos.
I had no idea how fascinating the history of maize is!
Thank you! The history of maize is AMAIZING!
The transition is amazing 😁
Man, I love your videos. So glad I found this channel. This was super interesting!
Thank you!
Corn saved many northern Italian farmers from starvation through the invention of polenta, but it also condemned them to be always harrowed with pellagra, since they didn't know nixtamalization.
So, my feelings about corn are conflicted, actually.
BTW the same word "pellagra" comes from Italian.
Thank God for Mesoamerica . They gave the world so many foods.
If you nixtamalize corn, it does more than make maize more nutritious, it actually makes the corn taste better.
(Roast corn on the cob always tastes better than boiled I say. Props to my ancestors.)
@@boardcertifiable I didn't know that, thanks!
It's interesting how much we have in common food wise across the world. I found out researching my Breton heritage that buckwheat was an important crop in France. It was introduced in the 16th century and even though its output was irregular it wasn't being taxed. Buckwheat grows on infertile or acidic soil and can be harvested three months after sowing. Of course I had to mention "galettes bretonnes" or simply galettes which is a buckwheat flour crepe (pancake). I've read that the Netherlands, Belgium, India, and Nepal had a similar dish.
EFAP sent me, and I was not disappointed
Thanks! Who's EFAP?
@@AncientAmericas It stands for Every Frame A Pause, they're a video response channel, one of their hosts mentioned how fascinating this video was.
@@kari2570 well color me flattered. Thank you!
brooo im doing a project on this and found this randomly, very well done thank you!
Thank you!
Wheat and rice are like, "C'mon, give me a chance!"
I'd like to see a similar video about tomatoes!
12:50 this is so interesting, in my Mohawk class we were talking about what we'd all had for breakfast and my prof mentioned he usually eats either poridge or a similar Mohawk dish where you put the grain in wood ash water, now I know why that's done. Very cool that these methods are still used today, humans are so ingenious.
Another excelent video my friend!, maybe you can make another video about other american crops, like amarant, a favorite here in México and nahuatl people
With maize being so awesome it sucks to be allergic to it. Fun fact though: corn syrup is so heavily processed that even with a corn allergy corn syrup doesn't have the same gastrically-distressing effects.
Great video as always!
Thanks!
Your videos are the best, thank you for making content about our ancestors
You're welcome! Thank you for the kind words.
All hail Rags and the Longman.
The longman reigns supreme
17:50 how do you spell the name of that tribe?
Haudenosaunee, but you probably know them as the Iroquois.
@@AncientAmericas thank you for the very quick reply. This isn't the first time you've done this for me. You're the only large TH-camr I've seen reply to so many comments.
It would require a whole entire volume in books to name and describe all of the strictly American food plants, fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, esc. That were known to and used by the Ancient Americans. Prominent amount them are the various snap beans, Lima beans, squashes, pumpkins, water melons, peppers, egg plants, tomatoes, white and sweet potatoes, cassava, pineapples, strawberries, avocados, arrowroot, cashews, cacao, cranberries, papaya, peanuts, Jerusalem Artichokes 👁️, pecan nut, Brazil nuts, blackberries, blueberries, and esc. Over 80 percent of the World food crops are indigenous and orginal to the Americas.
Greetings from EFAP 🦏🥛
Yes sir
Back at you!
Amazing info. Thank you so, so much for your work. I look forward tot he chance of using (and duly crediting) your work for teaching about aboriginal peoples from America.
Thank you!
EFAP sent me, thanks for the cool video!
You're welcome!
I'm one of the lucky ones, born in a jacal en la labor vieja en la Hacienda la Escondida right on the river San Juan. Im almost 80 now but still clearly remember the reverance and love my grandfather had for his land and his maize.
So the three sisters or milpa would be incredibly efficient into maintaining a high soil quality, specially when combined with chinampas. They would add chilli peppers to deter pests. An understanding to their whole harvesting systems and an application of it in the Americas could have saved us from global warming.
I like your thinking!
@@AncientAmericas and I like yours, I seriously devoured all your content twice all over, we need more of this! America has a story with full on marvellous accomplishments. If you know of #VSauce (of course you do... every TH-cam does) it doesn’t serve us well as humans and specially as Continental American to neglect this continents history.
It still can save us
permaculture still can :)
@@ajmentel2453 can you imagine Mexico implementing cultural landscapes just like the rice paddies in the Philippines that would no only look fantastic but all would act as a natural cooler and a home for so many endemic animals and pants that got displaced by the largest city in the world. Also I think it would hold the ground to prevent the ever sinking of the city.
Why your videos are fascinating. Great job again
Thank you!
me when Ancient Americas uploads content: liked, subscribed, added to favorites, telling my friends about it
me when Ancient Americas makes puns: disliked, unfollowed, blocked, reported to TH-cam, lodged a complaint to the FCC, denounced to the International Criminal Court
What a wonderful statement, "It's the loose, promiscuous plant that knows how to to get around." Brilliant!
great little doco, thank you!
Thanks!
I heard a lecture in college about it being a catastrophic sex hormone mutation that led to the dispersion problem and some ancient person saw it and was the first propagator of it. Thank you who ever you were. I love a good buttermilk pone.
Have you done anything on cacao? Your videos are amazing!
Thanks! Michael Coe wrote a whole book on the history of chocolate. Once I get my hands on it, I'm sure I'll do an episode on cacao. But that's probably in the distant future.
@@AncientAmericas I'm enjoying all of your videos! Thank you for doing this.
I really enjoyed this video. Very informative, well presented, and a great narrator. "Thank You"!
Thank you!
its the greatest invention that allows me to live without gluten
We Grew Up Planting Corn Every Year, Sweet Corn, Pop Corn, Grain Corn, Always Had Fun In The Fields.
I gotta say....
IT 'S CORN
A BIG LUMP WITH KNOBS
IT HAS T H E J U I C E
Thank you for this video
Subscribed. Hello from EFAP 🦏🥛
Thank you! I apologize but I have no clue who EFAP is. Can you drop a link to their page or the episode?
@@AncientAmericas
m.th-cam.com/channels/HH-ybUwH1CfJrXxnqw6Ljw.html
This the archive channel for the podcast.
EFAP is a film criticism and video response podcast. They’re famous for their extremely long streams. During their streams, they tend to pause the video that they are responding to often, thus the name “Every Frame A Pause.” During Episode 147, your video was mentioned in passing by a cohost, and he recommended it to the audience.
The EFAP community members usually leave a comment to support the creator of the video in the algorithm.
Yours was a fascinating video, and I’m sure that EFAP sent you quite a few new fans.
@@executeorder6613 Thanks! I saw a few comments referencing it and I was curious because I had never heard of them.
@@AncientAmericas They mention your video around 5h and 40 mins in... not sure but it's close.
Would you ever consider doing a video on the Eastern Agricultural complex? It gets overlooked a lot
Yes I have and it's on my list.
"Corn is our blood, our soul..."
And you didn't even apologize for the corny jokes at the beginning :D Great Video!
ba-dum-tiss!
Thanks to the Indigenous population of the Americas, who for thousands of years of observation Hybridization manipulation and modification of Crops, also terrains using Rocks, Aqueduct and Terrazas, implement int the use of Fire to manage Forrested areas, Savannas and such, (they were the truly master Genetist of ancient times,) Thanks to all their achievements the world today can enjoy so many Crops like Maize, Sunflowers, Rubber/Latex, Potatoes, Batatas , Yucca/Cassava, Peanut, Avocado, Beans, Chilis, tomatoes, Agave, Squash, Papaya, Cacao/Chocolate, Chia, Dragon fruit (Pitahaya) Pineapple, Quinoa, Amaranth plus many other "exotic" fruits/Crops that didn't leave the continent of America (not to be Confused with 🇺🇲) or didn't create a huge impact to the world like the other crops, many of those unknown crops fruits are prevalent today in the palate of Latinoaméricanos of the many different kinds and races like, Afrodescendents, indigenous, Asians, Caucasians and the combination of all these different "races", living in these Vast lands... Example: Nances, Açai, Quenepas, Jocotes, Yaca, Guanabana, Níspero, Zapotes, Cactus/Tuna and the list is Huge, you just need to go to a local Market in towns or cities in any countries of the Americas. And you will be astonished. Try Peru, Bolivia or Central de Abastos Market in Mexico City for example. Saludos from a Nicaragüense 👋👋👋
I had the privilege to go on the Ute reservation and explore several cliff dwellings. There are 800-1000 year old corn cobs that were so tiny. Now I know why. I recommend to anyone the Ute Mountain Tribal Park if you are near Mesa Verde. Much better than the National Park.
Fact based AND entertaining is such a wonderful thing. Kudos to you for this quality content. Keep up the good work! Just FYI, The Algorithm sent me from my recommended. All Hail The Algorithm :)
The algorithm is a fickle mistress. But seriously, thank you!
@@AncientAmericas Isn't that the truth!!! But she has thrown a few interesting creators into my mix: Beau of the 5th Column (thoughts/current events), Robert Fuller (artist/British wildlife cams), your awesome archeology channel, and more!!! 🍀✌️😸🦋