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General maize history: Warman 2003; Anon. 1982 (“not domesticated,” 5).

Paleo-Indian agricultural development and MacNeish’s work: MacNeish 1967, 1964; Flannery and Marcus 2002. MacNeish died in 2001.

Long debate over origin of maize: Kahn 1985:3–82; Galinat 1992.

Mangelsdorf theory: Mangelsdorf, MacNeish, and Galinat 1964. Mangelsdorf first proposed the extinct-wild-ancestor theory in Mangelsdorf and Reeves 1939. I am grateful to Dr. Wilkes for lending me a copy of this document. See also, Mangelsdorf 1986.

Beadle’s theory: Beadle 1939.

Caustic letters: E.g., the exchanges between Beadle and another Nobel-winning biologist, Barbara McClintock, in 1972 (McClintock Papers, “Searching for the Origins of Maize in South America, 1957–1981: Documents,” letters of 22 Jan.–24 Feb. 1972, available online at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/Views/Exhibit/documents/origins.html).

Iltis theory: Iltis 1983.

Teosinte-gamagrass theory and critiques: Eubanks 2001b (McClintock quotes, 509), 1997; Bennetzen et al. 2001.

Teosinte mutations: The development of three of these mutations is elucidated in Jaenicke-Després 2003. See references therein for the discoverers of the genes.

Maize in a decade: Eyre-Walker et al. 1998. Essentially the team argued that in ten years breeders with exactly the right teosinte variants could have created maize if they were as systematic as modern breeders. One assumes that the actual development time was longer.

Locus and timing of development of maize: MacNeish went back to his early maize cobs with new tools and decided they dated to about 3500 B.C. (Farnsworth et al. 1985). Subsequently, researchers did the same for early maize cobs from nearby Oaxaca, pushing back the date to about 4200 B.C. (Piperno and Flannery 2001; Benz 2001). Both of these sites contained fully domesticated maize (Benz and Iltis 1990). Pope et al. found teosinte pollen grains as early as 5100 B.C. in a wet Gulf Coast site where teosinte is not native, suggesting that it was moved there from the highlands. By 4000 B.C. the pollen is dominated by modern maize (Eubanks 2001a; MacNeish and Eubanks 2000; Pope et al. 2001).

“arguably man’s”: Federoff 2003.

Diversity of maize: Doebley, Goodman, and Stuber 1998. The reason for the diversity is that the ancestor species were hyperdiverse (Eyre-Walker et al. 1998).

Aragón Cuevas research: Author’s interviews, Aragón Cuevas. The number of landraces varies from study to study, because the term is not precisely defined. It is often claimed that more than two hundred exist in Latin America (e.g., Wellhausen et al. 1957, 1952).

Five thousand cultivars: Author’s interview, Wilkes. This is a widely cited guess by a distinguished researcher with long experience in the field.

Chamula statistics: Anon. ed. 1998a. The data are from 1991, the most recent year for which census results are available.

Perales’s study: Author’s interview, Perales.

Milpa: Here I describe the Mesoamerican variant of an ideal. Milpa-style agriculture occurs in much of South America, though centered often on potatoes or manioc instead of maize. Even in Mesoamerica, plenty of actual milpas are nothing more than maize fields, especially where farmers grow maize for the market. Subsistence-farm milpas I have seen tend to be more diverse. Milpa cultivation is often described—incorrectly, according to Wilkes (author’s interview)—as synonymous with “slash-and-burn,” in which farmers clear small areas for short times and then let them go fallow (e.g., the otherwise useful Ewell and Sands 1987). Slash-and-burn, though, is generally a modern innovation (see chap. 9). A good description of the milpa is Wilken 1987. A classic early study is Cook 1921.

Green Revolution and milpa: Author’s interviews, Denevan, Hallberg, Perales, Wilkes (“most successful”), James Boyce; Mann 2004.

Abundance of wild wheat and barley: Harlan and Zohary 1966 (“square kilometers,” “Over many thousands,