Ama(i)zing stuff!
"Corn flakes for breakfast, tamales for lunch, and some hominy grits with a side of corn bread for dinner? As delicious as this corn-ucopia sounds, such a maize-heavy diet is not without potential health trade-offs: Maize contains very little lysine, an amino acid important for preventing connective tissue disorders and anemia. For the hundreds of millions of people around the world who rely on maize as their primary source of food, finding dietary supplements that can add lysine is vital to prevent malnutrition.
To help understand how the earliest maize-eating societies avoided these consequences, a group of researchers examined the remains of 39 humans who lived in Belize between 1100 and 6100 years ago—just a few millennia after corn was first domesticated in Mexico.
By taking small samples from the skeletal remains and analyzing the ratios of carbon isotopes in their amino acids, the researchers deduced that the people ate animals like turkeys that had themselves eaten corn and concentrated the lysine in their bodies, allowing the amino acid to build up through a process known as trophic magnification. The findings ... suggest that Mesoamericans may have provided maize to food animals long before fully domesticating them around 2200 years ago ..."
From the abstract:
"The adoption of maize as a dietary staple shaped human societies. While a reliable carbohydrate-rich source, its inherent nutritional limitations posed substantial challenges.
Maize is deficient in lysine, an essential amino acid crucial for maintaining balanced health.
Maize-dependent diets, therefore, necessitated complementary dietary strategies. We report amino acid stable carbon isotope data from 39 directly dated humans from southern Belize [6100 to 1100 before present (B.P.)] to investigate how early populations mitigated nutritional deficiencies.
Concentration-dependent mixing model results indicate that protein supplementation from maize-eating animals contributed maize-derived lysine to human diets through trophic magnification (elevated proportions of isotopically distinct nutrients in tissues from trophic transfer).
Our results indicate that such strategies were in place by 6100 B.P., consistent with evidence of early maize cultivation but predating reliance by ~2000 years. Our findings highlight early coevolutionary dynamics linking maize cultivation and human-animal provisioning relationships, deepening understandings of adaptive food systems during agricultural transitions and offering insights into nutritional strategies underpinning sustainable subsistence."
Nutritional Adaptations to Early Maize Cultivation: Earliest Isotopic Evidence of Maize Based Animal Provisioning in the Neotropics Tracing Early Maize-Based Animal Provisioning (original news release)
Fig. 1. Human and turkey maize and nixtamalized maize daily requirements.
Fig. 6. Analytical framework for calculating dietary contributions of maize-based foods and maize-consuming animals to individual lysine δ13C values.
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