essentially the same as it is in pure corn (4). All of these 
circumstances combine to make the teosinte theory much more 
plausible than it was in the nineteenth century. 
The teosinte school concedes that the archaeological evi- 
dence presently available lends little support to the teosinte 
theory but regards this evidence as being outweighed by the 
cytogenetic evidence. It suggests that supporting archaeologi- 
cal evidence is lacking because the early stages in teosinte’s 
domestication occurred in open campsites where cultural re- 
mains have not been preserved (5, 7). 
On the question of the fossil pollen discovered in Mexico, the 
teosinte school is distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand it says 
that this evidence is not to be taken seriously or the data are 
confusing and ambiguous and they do not solve the problem of 
the origin of corn (5). On the other hand the school asserts that 
because of the relevance of the fossil pollen to the validity of 
the teosinte hypothesis it requires rigorous examination (6). 
That examination results in the rather conflicting conclusions 
that the fossil pollen is not large enough to be reliably distin- 
guished from teosinte, but is too large to be the pollen of a 
primitive wild corn (/9, /, 20). Finally the school explains the 
fossil pollen as contamination occurring during the core- 
sampling operation (/). 
The corn theorists, including the present authors, agree that 
cultivated corn undoubtedly had an ancestral form and hold 
that this was a wild corn, probably now rendered extinct ini- 
tially because of repeated hybridization with cultivated corn 
once the practice of agriculture began, and later by the depre- 
dations of Old-World grazing animals, horses, cows, burros, 
sheep and goats introduced by the Spaniards and other col- 
onists. This school sees corn differing from teosinte in numer- 
ous genetic, morphological, taxonomic and evolutionary 
characteristics (8, 9), and regards the genetic evidence, consid- 
ered as a whole, as showing teosinte differing from corn not by 
afew genes (/), but by genes or blocks of genes on virtually all 
of its chromosomes (8). This school regards the archaeological 
evidence as critical and the paleobotanical evidence involving 
the fossil pollen as virtually conclusive (/0, /3). 
It is the authenticity of the fossil pollen that we wish espe- 
238 
