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The story
The theory that “corn can’t reproduce on its own, so aliens must have made it” sparked a thread on 5ch’s Science News+ board about the history of crop breeding. According to the article, corn’s actual ancestor is a closely related wild plant called “teosinte,” and starting around 7000–9000 BC, humans repeatedly selected individuals with larger kernels, eventually shaping it into the corn we know today. In response, commenters piled on with other examples of “plants that spread without producing seeds,” citing bananas, bread wheat, and Japanese narcissus.
August 18, 2026
Izumi Nakagawa
Developed by aliens? The mystery of a plant that can’t reproduce on its own
Source: friday.kodansha.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
The pre-mutation parent, and the birth of a new mutant creature
Once this offspring has mutated so much that it's considered a different thing from the parent,
it's no longer called an offspring — it's the birth of a new species (the emergence of a starting point) → that's the argument for 'chicken first'
The same thing happens when humans surpass humanity and become a new species
and a species distinct from Homo sapiens is born
https://inri.client.jp/hexagon/floorB1F_hss/b1fha400.html
Isn't the mutation actually happening at the point of fertilization?
That's the argument for 'egg first.'
Well, if you can't tell at the egg stage, then you could also say it's not the chicken but the chick that comes first.
The reality is more low-key than that
Once a banana plant has fruited, that same stalk won't fruit again, so you cut it partway down and later pull it out. Then a new shoot sprouts up nearby.
Lettuce is in the daisy family (Asteraceae) and napa cabbage is in the mustard family (Brassicaceae), so I don't think they can actually cross-breed.
Humans grow them, and only the ones with traits convenient for humans get selected and survive.
Japanese narcissus doesn't produce seeds either, so it only spreads by bulb division
It's a sterile triploid variety formed when a normal diploid crossed with a mutant tetraploid.
It takes 100,000 years for a 50cm height mutation from 170cm to occur
So the crew of that craft must be humans from 100,000 years in the future
How did it turn into this?
Bears, boars, and birds would probably just tear it apart and scatter it
>>Corn began to be improved by humans around 7000 to 9000 BC. The earliest corn had very small kernels, but by repeatedly selecting and replanting individuals with larger kernels over thousands of years, it's said to have become the corn we know today.
>>"Nightshade family plants contain toxins, but the tomatoes and eggplants we eat today use varieties with low toxin levels in the edible parts. That's because low-toxin strains were selectively bred. That's how humans have improved plants."
>>Crops aren't just the product of human selection. New species can also arise through natural crossbreeding. Take bread wheat, the raw material for bread, for example.
>>"Bread wheat came about when Tausch's goatgrass (Aegilops tauschii, which looks like an ordinary grass) naturally crossed with a cultivated variety close to durum wheat — the kind used in pasta — likely growing in the same field. Because it turned out to be so useful to humans, it came to be cultivated all over the world."
[Soviet Domestication Experiment] What happens if you keep breeding only the docile individuals? (3/3)
Published 2025.01.25 00:00:00 SATURDAY
https://nazology.kusuguru.co.jp/archives/169150/3
But then a mutant variety appeared whose seeds didn't shatter, and that's what spread to become what we grow today.
If that mutation had never happened, we'd be eating rolled barley or porridge instead of bread.
That's a whole different level from the corn story
The stuff used to finish off some phony magic ritual, huh?
The plants are the superior ones here, the real bosses
Nom nom, food'z tasty (written in deliberately cutesy, baby-talk style)
The elephants that used to swallow those huge seeds went extinct, cutting off their means of reproducing
These days, thanks to humans, they've multiplied like crazy
Not elephants. It was giant ground sloths and armadillos
The megafauna (giant animals) that swallowed avocados' huge seeds whole and carried them far away, sustaining the species, went extinct roughly 13,000 years ago. Notable examples include giant ground sloths (Megatherium), giant armadillos (Glyptodon), and gomphotheres (ancient elephant relatives).
Elephants come in third place lol
Since they're both grasses, even the snacks turn out similar
We can't pollinate with stamens and pistils
so I guess all we can do is fuse with ourselves solo…
Guess we're not very grateful for it, huh
Background and Key Points
Teosinte, corn’s wild ancestor, still grows across Mexico and Central America and looks almost nothing like a modern ear of corn: its kernels number in the single digits, encased in a hard shell, spread along a thin, easily shattering spike. Archaeological and genetic evidence puts the start of its transformation at roughly 7000–9000 BC, as early farmers in Mesoamerica repeatedly chose plants with larger, softer kernels over thousands of years. That timeline predates the pyramids of Giza by millennia, which is part of why the “aliens made it” theory keeps recirculating in Japan as a piece of internet folklore alongside stories like the “corn grandma” (トウモロコシばあさん), an urban legend about a woman killed to protect the plant’s origins that one poster alludes to.
The thread didn’t actually litigate the alien claim — commenters mostly dismissed it outright and called it a writer’s invention — and instead split on what “can’t reproduce on its own” should even mean. Some read it as true asexual propagation, citing bananas and Japanese narcissus, both of which are sterile and spread only by division of bulbs or corms. Others pointed to bread wheat and the napa-cabbage/cabbage hybrid “Hakuran” as cases of natural cross-species hybridization, which is a completely different phenomenon from clonal propagation.
What the thread never quite nails down is that corn does produce viable seeds — kernels are seeds — so it isn’t asexually propagated like bananas or narcissus at all. Its real dependency on humans comes from the husk: domestication tightened corn’s ear casing so much that kernels can no longer scatter and self-sow, unlike teosinte’s shattering spike, so someone has to physically remove and replant them.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “Made by Aliens!? The Mystery of Corn That Can’t Reproduce on Its Own, and the New Variety Born in ’25 That Could Save Us From a Food Crisis.”
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