That meant her pottery studies could give him vital clues about how domesticated corn looked many centuries before the Spanish conquest.
So her research trips to Mexico and Peru aided Mangelsdorf's continuing work. In turn, Mangelsdorf's passion quickly rubbed off on her. Eubanks began studying biology and performing botanical research at Duke, Indiana, North Carolina State and Vanderbilt universities.
Scientists, including herself, now agree that teosinte is an ancestor of corn, Eubanks said. Native to Mexico and Guatemala, it features corn-like leaves and a tall stalk crowned by corn-like tassels. It also has hard seeds that line up in a single row -- called a "spike."
However, Mangelsdorf once believed one of corn's true ancestors was Tripsacum, a grass that ranges throughout North and South America. "It's a pervasive weed around here," Eubanks said. "It's on roadsides, railroad tracks and bridges."
The Tripsacum plant resembles corn less than teosinte does. But both grasses grow single rows of grain on spikes. And both feature separate male and female flowers on the same plant -- just like corn.
Moreover, Tripsacum occasionally produces paired kernels, a distinctive feature of corn linked to the evolution of corn's multiple rows. In contrast to teosinte, Tripsacum's kernels are also easy to remove from their hard fruitcases, making them accessible as a wild food. And "they are highly nutritious and delicious," Eubanks said.
Based on breeding experiments in the 1930s, Mangelsdorf and other researchers postulated that the earliest true corn was derived from a cross between Tripsacum and a now-extinct wild corn. Under that view, annually growing teosinte -- the only kind then known -- was a later offspring rather than an ancestor.
Archeological evidence in Central America backed up Tripsacum's
role,
'"/>
Contact: Monte Basgall
monte@dukenews.duke.edu
919-681-8057
Duke University
4-Jun-1997