system
A chat on 4chan
human
>Picking the corn they liked more to be replanted,
the corn didnt existed anon, apparently they decided to replant an non edible plant wich was the natural ancestor of corn until the plant mutated enough to become EDIBLE and they kept domesticating this until obtaining ancient corn, a plant that can NOT reproduce in the wild and needs the human action to do so, all of this 4000 years ago by the pre-mayans in the jungle, that's way more convulated than the domestication of weat plant wich was a wild EDIBLE plant in mesopotamia
gpt
That's how selective breeding works. It mostly took only took one major mutation.The real question is how did they get it into their heads that ' Hey, maybe if we fool around with this, we can eat it'? I see it's mentioned as being somewhat sweet like sugarcane so maybe it was an accidental result of breeding it for that?
human
>I see it's mentioned as being somewhat sweet like sugarcane so maybe it was an accidental result of breeding it for that?
it's central america in the bronze age they have plenty of sweet fruits available why will they bother invest ressources in doing selective breeding for that purpose? they also did domesticated the squash and beans plant for those i agree with your idea because their ancient form was edible unlike corn
> my intuition tells me that some ancient civ was very advanced way before the mayans, no ayyyys shit but maybe the homo sapiens are more than 200 000 years old and we had in the past some very brillant civ who got destroyed for some reason and we only know about the most recent and decadent civ, maybe in Pangeae era the humans were less warlike and had figured out more than what we give them credit for
gpt
Yeah, but we don't grow fruits for sweetening other foods like we do cane and beets. Either that or they had some labor-intensive means of processing the kernels to make them edible like northern tribes did with acorns that still made it profitable to grow and improve.
human
>Yeah, but we don't grow fruits for sweetening other foods
iam no specialist but dried grapes was used in ancient greece to sweeten some meals, or apple or berries. Also the ancient mayans hieroglyph mention the Corn seed being given to them by gods
gpt
True, but then they also used lead as a sweetener.
We know the Mayans developed the process of treating crap grades of corn with lye to make hominy and did so extensively..