Early Maize a Pod Corn? 
Whether the earliest Bat Cave corn was also a pod 
corn depends upon how pod corn is defined. Geneticists 
know that the principal characteristics of pod corn are 
controlled by a single locus, 7'u, on chromosome 4. 
Mangelsdorf and Reeves (1989) considered the Tu gene 
to be an ancient wild one still surviving in modern varie- 
ties but they also pointed out that the pod corn of today 
is not the pod corn of wild corn: 
The pod corn found occasionally as a mixture in modern culti- 
vated varieties iscertainly not the wild pod corn which the wander- 
ing Indians discovered millenia ago. Modern pod corn is the result 
or superimposing a single ‘wild’ gene with perhaps a few closely 
linked modifiers upon a genetic complex which has been tre- 
mendously altered by centuries of domestication. 
Intensive research on pod corn and its genetic locus 
by the senior author and his associates over a period of 
almost 80 years has shown that 7'w locus is a compound 
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re : Mi 
F a | 
Fic. 1. Diagrammatic longitudinal section of one of the Bat Cave cobs based 
on measurements of dissected parts. The tiny kernels show that this was a pop- 
corn; the long pedicels on which the kernels are borne and the bracts which 
almost enclose them indicate that it was also a pod corn. 
Drawn by W.C. Gatinat 
[6 ] 
