History of rice cultivation

The current scientific consensus, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence, is that Oryza sativa rice was first domesticated in the Yangtze River basin in China 9,000 years ago.

The first, and most likely, is in the lower Yangtze River, believed to be the homelands of the pre-Austronesians and possibly also the Kra-Dai, and associated with the Kauhuqiao, Hemudu, Majiabang, Songze, Liangzhu, and Maqiao cultures.

[4][17][18][19] The second is in the middle Yangtze River, believed to be the homelands of the early Hmong-Mien-speakers and associated with the Pengtoushan, Nanmuyuan, Liulinxi, Daxi, Qujialing, and Shijiahe cultures.

[26] From about 2000 to 1500 BC, the Austronesian expansion began, with settlers from Taiwan moving south to colonize Luzon in the Philippines, bringing rice cultivation technologies with them.

From Luzon, Austronesians rapidly colonized the rest of Island Southeast Asia, moving westwards to Borneo, the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra; and southwards to Sulawesi and Java.

[18] It has been speculated the rice did not survive the Austronesian voyages into Micronesia due to the sheer distance of ocean they were crossing and the lack of abundant rain.

[27] Rice, along with other Southeast Asian food plants, were also later introduced to Madagascar, the Comoros, and the coast of East Africa by around the 1st millennium AD by Austronesian settlers from the Greater Sunda Islands.

The cultivation of rice then occurred on a small scale, fields were impermanent plots, and evidence shows that in some cases domesticated and wild grains were planted together.

[39] O. sativa was recovered from a grave at Susa in Iran (dated to the first century AD) at one end of the ancient world, while at the same time rice was grown in the Po valley in Italy.

Increasing scale of rice production in the region has recently brought criticism towards growers' alleged bad practices in regard to the environment.

Archeologists focusing on East and Southeast Asia argue that rice farming began in south-central China along the Yangtze River and spread to Korea and Japan from there south and northeast.

[55] The study is based on modern distribution maps of wild rice populations which may be potentially inconclusive due to drastic climatic changes that happened during the end of the last glacial period, ca.

[21] An older theory, based on one chloroplast and two nuclear gene regions, Londo et al. (2006) had proposed that O. sativa rice was domesticated at least twice—indica in eastern India, Myanmar, and Thailand; and japonica in southern China and Vietnam—though they concede that archaeological and genetic evidence exist for a single domestication of rice in the lowlands of southern China.

[56] In 2003, Korean archaeologists announced they discovered rice husks in Soro-ri, Korea, which dated to 13,000 BC, that they claimed show signs of having been cut by stone tools.

[60][62][63] Today, the majority of all rice produced comes from China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Philippines, Korea and Japan.

Historic written evidence for the earliest cultivation, however, comes from eighth century stone inscriptions from the central island of Java, which show kings levied taxes in rice.

Divisions of labour between men, women, and animals that are still in place in Indonesian rice cultivation, were carved into relief friezes on the ninth century Prambanan temples in Central Java: a water buffalo attached to a plough; women planting seedlings and pounding grain; and a man carrying sheaves of rice on each end of a pole across his shoulders (pikulan).

The Ifugao people practice traditional farming spending most of their labor at their terraces and forest lands while occasionally tending to root crop cultivation.

According to the Jerusalem Talmud (3rd to 4th centuries CE), rice was grown in Caesarea, Paneas-Caesarea Phillipi, and the Chrysopolis area to the north of the Sea of Galilee (in modern-day Israel).

[84] Following the Islamic conquest, its cultivation moved north to Nisibin, the southern shores of the Caspian Sea (in Gilan and Mazanderan provinces of Iran)[40] and then beyond the Muslim world into the valley of the Volga.

[90] Labour opportunities in the rice fields meant a salary increase and a generally improved economic situation for many rural workers.

[86] Tradition (possibly apocryphal) has it that pirate John Thurber was returning from a slave-trading voyage to Madagascar when he was blown off course and put into Charleston for repairs.

[94] In the United States, colonial South Carolina and Georgia grew and amassed great wealth from the slave labor obtained from the Senegambia area of West Africa and from coastal Sierra Leone.

At first the rice was laboriously milled by hand using large mortars and pestles made of wood, then winnowed in sweetgrass baskets (the making of which was another skill brought by slaves from Africa).

Rice culture in the southeastern U.S. became less profitable with the loss of slave labor after the American Civil War, and it finally died out just after the turn of the 20th century.

[99] Unlike the Arkansas–Mississippi Delta region, California's production is dominated by short- and medium-grain japonica varieties, including cultivars developed for the local climate such as Calrose, which makes up as much as 85% of the state's crop.

Although attempts to grow rice in the well-watered north of Australia have been made for many years, they have consistently failed because of inherent iron and manganese toxicities in the soils and destruction by pests.

[104] Because irrigation water, despite the extremely low runoff of temperate Australia,[105] was (and remains) very cheap, the growing of rice was taken up by agricultural groups over the following decades.

Above-average rainfall from the 1950s to the middle 1990s[106] encouraged the expansion of the Riverina rice industry, but its prodigious water use in a practically waterless region began to attract the attention of environmental scientists.

Australian Aboriginal people have harvested native rice varieties for thousands of years, and there are ongoing efforts to grow commercial quantities of these species.