In article .com,
"Mike Lyle" writes:
|
| It's very interesting if you like that kind of thing: if I may dare to
| summarise, maize does have a single wild ancestor, called teosinte, but
| it doesn't look like maize. The ancestral mutation wasn't a hybrid,
| though all our forms are its hybriid descendants, and it did suddenly
| come about in prehistoric times. There was once a view that "Indian
| corn" came from extinct ancestors, but that's been shown to be wrong by
| modern genetic studies.

I looked it up in my Encyclopaedia Britannica before posting, and that
said that the genes for bare seeds probably came from another species
of maize, so it may well be an ancient hybrid (like plums).


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.