About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in what is now southern Mexico started hedging their edible bets by cultivating a baseball-size squash called Cucurbita pepo. That is at least 5,000 years before the first evidence of domesticated beans and corn -- the other two staple cultivars of Mesoamerican prehistory -- and roughly coincident with the dawn of agriculture in Mesopotamia where barley first was raised.
Scientists have uncovered the secret of mankind's soaring intellect - fish. Thanks to our predilection for cockles and mussels, shrimps and the odd bit of cod, our chimp-brained ancestors were transformed into a species so smart it now rules the Earth.
