The giant grass domesticated from the wild plant teosinte by Indigenous Mesoamerican farmers thousands of years ago — and transformed so completely it cannot reproduce without human help — maize became the sacred staple of Maya and Aztec civilization, spread after 1492 to fuel population booms across Africa, China, and Europe, and now underpins the industrial food system as the world's most-produced grain by volume.
Maize is one of the few major grains so thoroughly domesticated that it cannot reliably survive in the wild without human help. Pull the husk off a corn cob and let it fall to the ground: the seeds sit too close together, too few can germinate, and the plant chokes itself out. Corn needs a human hand to plant it. That dependency is not an accident of nature. It is the result of ten thousand years of deliberate farming — one of the most astonishing acts of biological engineering in human history, carried out without laboratories, by Indigenous farmers in what is now Mexico.