Popcorn is about 6,700 years old. The earliest popping-corn cobs, from around 4700 BC, were found on the northern coast of Peru, two thousand years before Egypt's first pyramid.

4700 BC · 2670 BC · apart: 2030 years

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The event

• Domestication of maizec. 7000 BC · Balsas River valley, southern Mexico. About 9,000 years ago, farmers in southern Mexico began selecting seeds of teosinte, a wild grass whose ears held only a handful of kernels. Millennia of selection turned it into maize, which fed the Olmec, Maya, Aztecs and Inca. After Columbus it spread worldwide, and today it is the most-harvested grain on Earth.

Prehistory · 27th century BC

More amazing facts

• 5500 BC · 1615 BC The oldest surviving cheese was found on mummies in the Taklamakan Desert and is about 3,600 years old. Cheese-making is older still: clay strainers with milk-fat residues from Poland date to about 5500 BC.
• 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
• 4600 BC · 3000 BC Australia's Aboriginal eel traps are older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.
• 4500 BC · 2560 BC The world's oldest gold treasure is nearly 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramid.
• 4100 BC · 2560 BC The oldest known winery is some 1,500 years older than the Great Pyramid.
• 3807 BC · 2560 BC A wooden causeway in England has been dated to the very year: 3807 or 3806 BC. Tree rings show the Sweet Track across a marsh was laid 1,250 years before the Great Pyramid, and was used for only about ten years.

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