Corn: Its Origin, Evolution and Improvement
Corn: Its Origin, Evolution and Improvement
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发表时间：
1974
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通讯作者：
P. Mangelsdorf
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作者：
P. Mangelsdorf
玉米是最常见的谷物之一。它也是最神秘的之一。在这本插图精美的新书中，保罗·曼格尔斯多夫（Paul Mangelsdorf）也许是世界上最重要的玉米植物专家，他总结了一生致力于解开玉米之谜的工作。这种独特的谷物——在植物界的其他地方没有类似的谷物——只与人类相关，并且只有在人类干预的情况下才能生存。因此，玉米的故事在很多方面都是关于人的故事。曼格尔斯多夫教授结合了科学家和故事讲述者的技能，在寻找玉米起源的过程中，带领读者到墨西哥和美国西南部曾经有人居住的洞穴中进行考古挖掘，在墨西哥城深处的钻芯中发现花粉化石，并到实验田中揭示玉米的巨大多样性，并利用来自植物学、遗传学、细胞学的证据，作者试图通过考古学和历史来评估有关玉米起源的各种假设。他得出的结论是，栽培玉米的祖先是一种野生的豆荚玉米。玉米可能在墨西哥和南美洲多次由不同地理品种的野生玉米驯化；玉米和它的各种近亲之间的杂交导致了爆炸性的进化，导致了任何其他农作物都无法比拟的品种和形式的多样性。这是一本关于玉米的书，但它是为生物学家、农学家、人类学家和历史学家以及那些想了解有关谷物的感兴趣的外行人而写的书，谷物的四分之三转化为肉、奶、蛋和其他动物产品，是我们的基本食用植物，就像我们这个半球的祖先一样。
Corn is among the most familiar of grains; it is also one of the most mysterious. In this handsomely illustrated new book, Paul Mangelsdorf, perhaps the world's foremost expert on the corn plant, summarizes the work of a lifetime devoted to unraveling the enigma of corn. This unique grain--it has no close counterpart elsewhere in the plant kingdom--exists only in association with man, and it survives only as a result of his intervention. Thus, the story of corn is in many ways a story about people. Combining the skills of scientist and storyteller, Professor Mangelsdorf in his search for the origin of corn takes the reader to archaeological digs in once-inhabited caves in Mexico and the United States Southwest, to the discovery of fossil pollen in drill cores taken deep below Mexico City, and to experimental fields where the great diversity of corn is revealed and where the plant is hybridized with its relatives teosinte and Tripsacum, Drawing upon the evidence from botany, genetics, cytology, archaeology, and history, the author seeks to evaluate various hypotheses on the origin of corn. He concludes that the ancestor of cultivated corn was a wild form of pod corn; that corn may have been domesticated more than once in both Mexico and South America from different geographical races of wild corn; and that hybridizations between corn and its various relatives have resulted in explosive evolution leading to a diversity of varieties and forms unmatched in any other crop plant. This is a book about corn, but it is a book for biologists, agronomists, anthropologists, and historians, and for the interested layman who would like to know something about the grain which, transformed, as three fourths of it is, into meat, milk, eggs, and other animal products, is our basic food plant, as it was of the people who preceded us in this hemisphere