pip. nL!" 2^5]^" JOHN H. KERR RESERVOIR BASIN — MILLER 219 



This universal reliance of the pre-Columbian cultures on corn as the basic 

 food plant, and its great diversity of varieties, greater than that of any other 

 cereal, bespeak a long period of domestication. How old is corn as a cultivated 

 plant? Fortunately this investigation is no longer wholly a matter of guesswork. 

 Reasonably reliable estimates can be obtained by the ingenious method devised 

 by Willard F. Libby, of the University of Chicago, for determining the age of 

 ancient vegetal remains. . . . Libby's determinations of radiocarbon in archae- 

 ological remains of corn tend to bear out previous archaeological and geo- 

 logical estimates that the oldest corn yet found in South America goes back to 

 about 1,000 B.C., and the oldest in North America is not earlier than 2,000 

 B.C. [Mangelsdorf, 1950, pp. 20-21.] 



In the meantime a wholly unexpected discovery, made within the past two 

 years, has furnished direct evidence for the theory that primitive corn was both 

 a pod corn and a pop corn. During the summer of 1948 an expedition sponsored 

 by the Peabody Museum of Harvard University and led by Herbert W, Dick, 

 a graduate student in anthropology, uncovered many cobs and other parts of 

 corn from the accumulated refuse in an abandoned rock shelter in New Mexico 

 known as Bat Cave. This shelter was occupied from about 2,000 B.C. to 1,000 

 A.D. Uninhabited by modern concepts of sanitation, its successive generations 

 of occupants allowed refuse and trash to accumulate in the cave to a depth of 

 about six feet. Carefully removed and sifted by the archaeologists, the refuse 

 yielded 766 specimens of shelled cobs, 125 loose kernels and various fragments of 

 husks, leaf sheaths and tassels. The cobs are of particular interest, since they 

 reveal a distinct evolutionary sequence. The oldest, at the bottom of the refuse 

 heap, are the smallest and most primitive. These cobs and loose kernels from the 

 same level prove that the earliest Bat Cave people grew a primitive variety of 

 corn which was both a pop corn and a form of pod corn. . . . 



The Bat Cave corn shows no evidence whatever of having stemmed from 

 teosinte. But beginning about midway in the sequence there is strong evidence of 

 the introduction of a corn that had become contaminated with teosinte. Thus the 

 Bat Cave cobs suggest that early botanical investigators were not completely 

 wrong in believing that teosinte played a role in the evolution of corn. Although 

 teosinte clearly was not the progenitor of com, it contributed its genes to corn's 

 progress toward its present form. [Ibid., p. 24.] 



Evidence of corn's American origin is based on findings of two climatologists — 

 Dr. Paul Sears of Yale and Mrs. Kathryn Clisby of Oberlin, who have been study- 

 ing changes in pollen fossils in relation to climatic fluctuations. They found 

 grain pollen fossils, at first thought to be teosinte, in drill cores taken more 

 than 200 feet below Mexico City. Definite determination that the fossil pollen 

 grains were not teosinte, but corn was made by Professor Barghoorn and Miss 

 Wolfe, who have developed new laboratory techniques for distinguishing the 

 pollen of corn from that of other grasses such as teosinte. Professor Barg- 

 hoorn estimates, on the basis of currently accepted glacial chronology, that the 

 pollen is at least 60,000 years old. It thus antedates by many thousands of years 

 the earliest evidence of agriculture or of man himself in this hemisphere. . . . 



Primitive corn has been found by Professor Mangelsdorf and Dr. Folinat 

 among ancient cobs dug up in 1950 (1948?) by Herbert Dick, then of the Colorado 

 State Museum. [Earlier Dick was stated to be a graduate student in anthro- 

 pology who led the expedition sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Harvard 

 University.] This corn comes from Bat Cave in New Mexico and is dated at from 

 3,000 to 3,900 B.C. by radiocarbon estimates. The small cobs of the Bat Cave 

 corn, scarcely larger than a one-cent piece, once bore about fifty tiny kernels. 

 Remains of several kernels were found along with pieces of tassel, husk, and 

 pollen grains. From the combined vegetal remains it was possible to recon- 



