I love how teosinte (maize forerunner) was cultivated for the alcoholic beverage brewed from the stalk. The bigger seeds were selected by people, for convenience in re-seeding. Not as a food crop. But once they got big enough to grind and eat, it took off as a staple.

So the worlds' largest food crop owes its existence to - moonshiners.

Right about the same time Egypt was getting itself civilized up, and beginning to think about Pyramids.

Indeed, the time frames really underscore a lot for me:

“ Maize was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass growing in the lower reaches of the Balsas River Valley of Central Mexico, around 9,000 years ago. There is evidence maize was first cultivated in the Maya lowlands around 6,500 years ago, at about the same time that it appears along the Pacific coast of Mexico. But there is no evidence that maize was a staple grain at that time.”

You don't normally see a lot of early domestication work coming out of Belize, so this is nice to see. Most of the research has pointed to central Mexico as the epicenter of maize domestication, but it looks like they have a way better record to look at down there.

It's kind of strange how breatheless the UNM press office is to talk about the hardships of the site though. Who measures distance by walking days? Kudos to the team for managing what was surely a difficult site in notoriously gnarly terrain though

First KNOWN use. Diggers often claim to have found the first or earliest whatever it is, but they omit the qualifier.

Agreed and upvoted, I feel this sort of caveat should always be made. Also I don't like some of their other language here, but on balance it doesn't look like english is their strong point, so give them some slack.

The researchers didn't write the article headline and aren't responsible for it. If you're going to criticise people for being overly vague in their claims, it would be helpful to do so with some moderate level of accuracy.