Varieties of Modern Maize (IMAGE)
Caption
Varieties of the Avati ete'i, the sacred Guaranis' maize, April 2017 during the seed exchange fair, in La Paloma, State of Rocha, Uruguay. Although the team used maize curated in gene banks for this study, Fabio Freitas, an ethnobotanist and farm conservationist at Embrapa, said that his work conserving traditional cultivated plants with indigenous groups from the South border of the Amazon forest helped guide the discussion of how maize diffusion may have played out in the past. The team mapped out the genetic relationships between the plants and discovered several distinct lineages, each with its own degree of similarity to their shared ancestor, teosinte. In other words, Kistler explained, the final stages of maize's domestication happened more than once in more than one place.
Credit
Natália Carolina de Almeida Silva
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