The Three Sisters

Corn, beans, and squash, the three sisters, were the Native Americans’ crop, providing a stable source of calories, protein, and farming from Canada through South America. They allowed civilization to go from a hunting people to those who built cities that rivaled Europe and pyramids equal to the marvels seen in Egypt. The rise of civilizations has a pattern: grow a stable crop that allows people to survive, and go from nomads to develop complex societies.

In our series of foods that built civilizations, we turn to the Americas before Europeans arrived.

Long before Europeans arrived, civilizations in the Americas had developed writing, calendars, monumental architecture, cities, trade networks, irrigation systems, pottery, and sophisticated agriculture. Corn, or maize, fed the Maya, Inca, and Aztec worlds.

In what is now the American Southwest, Pueblo peoples built multi-story communities in the desert, while Mississippian societies built towns and enormous earthworks along the great river valleys.

It began with Corn, or MazeIt all began with a grass called Teosinte (pronounced “tA-O-‘sin-tE”). Teosinte does not look like corn today, but the DNA shows they are alike, and it was this grass that Native Americans 10,000 years ago began to engineer. In fact it wasn’t until a few years, 2005, ago that modern molecular geneticists discovered that this grass, Teosinte, was the father of corn. For years, people who study plants, botanists, assumed the evolutionary predecessor had long since become extinct. And while Teosinte is widely spread throughout Central America, it was not even considered in the same family as corn.

The original ear of Teosinte is 2-3 inches long with 5-12 kernels. The kernels were hard, and most human teeth would break trying to eat them. Teosinte is inedible for many people. Contrast Teosinte with modern corn with a cob. A cob is 12 inches long, with over 500 kernels. The coating on the kernel was selectively bred from the rock-hard protecting seed to, now, where corn has an easily chewable, paper-thin, but still indigestible membrane. This was breeding at its finest.

Ten thousand years ago, there was no plant that anyone would recognize as corn. In fact, there was no corn. By 4500 years ago, corn was throughout all the Americas, with carbon dating of kernels in Arizona from over 3000 years ago, in Canada 700 years ago. Corn allowed the Mayan people to go from a people who foraged to a people who could stay and cultivate.

You can see from the photos how, as time went on, corn changed: both Teosinte and corn have the same number of chromosomes, and they have the same genes that code for the same proteins. Teosinte and corn can be bred because they are so close genetically. The difference between the grass, Teosinte, and modern corn is about a few genes. Corn didn’t “evolve”; early Native Americans bred corn. Generation of corn after generation, they bred the crop that tasted better, chewed more easily, and survived well.

In what is now El Salvador, some have said the Mayans discovered corn in the mountains of Chalatenango. Recently, a dam revealed a village in the area, which was one of the original four Lake Island villages of the Mayans. On this land, one can see the range of corn from the grass to the modern corn. If you hike there, you can see places where the Mayans would grow special crops, where they would harvest the Teosinte with the kernels they could eat, and over time, they would breed it and cross-breed it until they had an agricultural system based on this plant.

So sacred was corn that they called it the “grain of the gods.” To this day, the people in Santa Ana, in western El Salvador, still plant little plots of primitive corn that they call something like “ulupiche”. This is not to eat, but simply to please the ancestors. It is from these Mayans that corn was selectively bred, or genetically engineered for better taste, different colors, and the ability to withstand pests.

Corn moved quickly,