Re: maize in ancient India: transpacific links (cont.)
Peter van Rossum (pmv100@psu.edu)
Sat, 28 Dec 1996 18:50:39 GMT
In article <5a3gjb$o93@news1.io.org> yuku@io.org (Yuri Kuchinsky) writes:
>These are the full implications of this maize evidence. A better smoking
>gun I could not imagine...
>Yuri.
Again, wouldn't you consider a real Precolumbian corn cob in an Old
World context a better piece of evidence than a scultpured form which
is subject to interpretation? If not, why not? If so, why have no such
remains ever been reported from Old World contexts?
I mean if maize was in the Old World for 1500+ years and had become
so well intergrated into the fabric of Indian life as to have taken
on a religious significance, isn't it reasonable to assume they would
have had significant quantities of maize plants growing? Native New
World peoples certainly did and we find corn cobs in New World contexts
all the time (hell I've even excavated gobs of them). This is the
exact same weakness which the Pompeii "pineapple" fresco and the
Precolumbian South American chicken hypotheses also suffer.
Peter van Rossum
PMV100@PSU.EDU
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