Thursday, May 13, 2010 - Giant City State Park, Makanda IL
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Another broken wing trick, Killdeer, Site 4, Freeman Community Club RV Park, Freeman MO, May 11, 2010
Night camp
Site 82 - Giant City State Park, Makanda IL
- Giant City State Park is a large older park located off US 51 mid way between Carbondale and Anna IL.
- This heavily wooded park has a large campground and many campsites with 30 AMP electric. Water and a dump station are available but not at the sites. Fee is $20.00 per night - no discounts.
- There is good Verizon cell phone and EVDO service
- Find Giant City State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Nights I've camped here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.