maize

She paused as she pounded the maize grains.

Sorghum and millet in Africa, and maize in the New World.

Let's start with North American corn or maize, as it's often called.

And in the Middle Ages, Europeans were familiar with lots of different spices, most important being pepper, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, maize and nutmeg.

New crops such as corn (maize) and sweet potatoes as well as peanuts and tobacco were introduced from the Americas.

Thus making them the oldest physical evidence of maize that we found so far.

And these tools were covered with a dusty residue, a residue of maize as it turns out.

They've also been able to estimate that the domestication of maize most likely occurred about 9000 years ago.

Through these successful experiments, he calculated that only about 5 specific genes were responsible for the main differences between teosinte and maize.

This new hybrid plant looked like an intermediate, right between maize and teosinte.

When researchers first started looking at wild teosinte plants, they thought there was a chance that the two plants, um, maize and teosinte, were related.

Now, scientific theories about the origins of maize first started coming out in the 1930s, one involved a plant called teosinte.

And that's made it hard for them to trace the history of maize.

But because it doesn't grow naturally, without human cultivation, and because there's no obvious wild relative of maize, um, well, for the longest time researchers weren’t able to find any clear link between maize and other living plants.

So, continuing with crop domestication and corn, or, um, maize as is often called, obviously it's one of the world's most important crops today.