In 2001, high in the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca mountains of southern Mexico, UC Berkeley graduate student David Quist hiked along some of the world’s oldest cornfields. Quist was sampling cobs for DNA testing, and what he found kicked off a scientific firestorm and brought attention to a subtle threat to the future of global agriculture. In those ancient Mexican varieties, Quist detected the DNA signature of genetically modified (GMO) corn. A living …
Decoding the Stories of Our Ancestors pt. 2
In my previous post, I discussed the evidence and arguments that led to the widespread acceptance of the “Recent Out-of-Africa” theory of human origins. Anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries defined the scope of the questions about our ancestry – Where did we originate? How long have we existed as a species? – and began to answer them using fossil evidence. However, …