What America’s ‘lost crops’ tell us about food in the age of climate change

“The wild ancestor looks completely different. It's just a tiny stack of rock hard seeds that don't look at all appetizing,” she said. “Over time that was transformed through evolution in human-managed environments into the juicy corncob that we know.”

Corn is one of the biggest examples of human domestication of plants over thousands of years. Mueller studies a lesser-known domesticated crop — an extinct, Indigenous member of the buckwheat family called erect knotweed.

“We don't really know exactly when people stopped growing [erect knotweed],” she said. “The latest dates that we have on these lost crops are like in the 1400s. … A lot of practices were lost during that time because populations were displaced, and they could only take certain things with them — and knowledge holders were lost.”