spikes

while i was out back taking my daily dose of teosinte photos ( there must be thousands taken over the last four years ) i noticed that one of the branches on a plant had broken...it has been a bit windy over the past few days and this one seems to have given way...it had a well developed flower and two nascent ears past the break...if the stem had just folded over i would have left it since that probably wouldn't have had much impact...teosinte wants to lean down to disperse seeds anyway..but this branch had broken so i brought it in to have a look...the smaller of the ears had a single spike with silks still attached while the larger ear had two spikes...some of the ears outside are exploding into more spikes than that and i have to wonder just how much coaxing it took to get these spikes to align themselves around a cob...how many generations of artificial selection and dead ends before there was maize? i know beadle and the iltus crowd say that tesointe was the ONLY ancestor of maize..i wonder...surely they have grown teosinte and seen this rather unruly behavior...did ancient farmers splice in some genes by cross pollinating this plant with something else? the experts say they KNOW...they also disagree...i am content to wonder...perhaps why i am not an expert...that and the fact that i have no desire to be one..so..i will plant teosinte and watch it grow for a s long as i can...bound to learn something, right?