240 Singing Valleys 



Station two geneticists were at work on the same problem. 

 Using Mendel's law as a basis for their experiments, they 

 set to work with zea mays, teosinte, tripsacum and several 

 other possible relatives of the family, even including the fa- 

 miliar garden plant called Job's-tears, to discover how the 

 chromosomes on which the genes are formed differ in and 

 resemble each other in maize and its relatives. 



It was a stupendous task, involving thousands of individual 

 plants and years of research. In 1939, the experimenters, P. G. 

 Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, published their findings in 

 a bulletin put out by the Texas Agricultural Experiment Sta- 

 tion. Actually, they had solved by science the mystery which 

 had baffled botanists since Columbus first brought maize to 

 the attention of the European world. 



The steps by which Mangelsdorf traced the lineage of 

 our American corn are so complicated that only a geneticist 

 can follow them in order. Briefly told, they prove that ten to 

 twenty-five thousand years ago, before the Asiatic immigrations 

 to this continent, a wild maize flourished in the highlands of 

 Central America. The winds blowing south carried its seed as 

 far as the Andes. The winds blowing north bore it to Mexico. 

 In the highlands of Mexico this primitive wild maize met and 

 mated with the Mexican tripsacum. The child of that marriage 

 was teosinte (euchlaena mexicana). 



For centuries wild maize, tripsacum and teosinte flourished 

 side by side. But the winds were not through with their 

 alchemy. Teosinte and its parent the wild maize mated. Of 

 that cross came zea mays, the foundation of Mayan and Aztec 

 culture, and destined to be the food of the American nation. 



What became of the wild maize which blew south into 

 the Andes? Its story is lost with the four civilizations which 

 flourished and vanished before the Incas ruled Peru. Whether 

 tripsacum went south with it or not, no one knows. But 

 seeds of tripsacum and seeds of a primitive dent corn have 

 been found in the ruins of the Ozark Bluff Dwellers, showing 



