Nature Genet. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. An evolutionary genomic tale of two rice species. A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Evolution of crop species: genetics of domestication and diversification. Rice genetics: Where it all began. University College London. Debating the origins of rice. Molecular evidence points to a single evolutionary origin of domesticated rice.
Boston University. Origins of agriculture in South China. Reprints and Permissions. Callaway, E. Domestication: The birth of rice. Nature , S58—S59 Download citation. Published : 29 October Issue Date : 30 October Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:.
Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Planta BMC Genomics Scientific Reports Journal of Biosciences Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Download PDF. Subjects Agriculture Genetics History Plant sciences. Chinese farmers planting rice — humans domesticated grass many centuries ago but archaeologists are still investigating the crop's origin.
A pot from the Han dynasty, about BC , for steamed food. Box 1: The second story: The roots of African rice A few thousand years after Asian farmers fully domesticated rice, ancient African farmers created a species of their own.
References 1 Gross, B. Article Google Scholar 3 Kovach, M. Article Google Scholar Download references. Author information Affiliations Ewen Callaway is a senior reporter at Nature. Related links Related links Related links in Nature Research An evolutionary genomic tale of two rice species A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice Evolution of crop species: genetics of domestication and diversification Rice genetics: Where it all began Related external links University College London.
Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions. About this article. Cite this article Callaway, E. These findings were received by academia with strong skepticism, and the results and their publicizing has been cited as being driven by a combination of nationalist and regional interests.
Louis, and Purdue University has provided the strongest evidence yet that there is only one single origin of domesticated rice, in the Yangtze Valley of China. The earliest remains of the grain in the Indian subcontinent have been found in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and date from — BC though the earliest widely accepted date for cultivated rice is placed at around — BC with findings in regions belonging to the Indus Valley Civilization.
Perennial wild rices still grow in Assam and Nepal. It seems to have appeared around BC in southern India after its domestication in the northern plains. It then spread to all the fertile alluvial plains watered by rivers. Cultivation and cooking methods are thought to have spread to the west rapidly and by medieval times, southern Europe saw the introduction of rice as a hearty grain.
African rice has been cultivated for years. Between and BC, Oryza glaberrima propagated from its original centre, the Niger River delta, and extended to Senegal. However, it never developed far from its original region.
Its cultivation even declined in favour of the Asian species, which was introduced to East Africa early in the common era and spread westward. African rice helped Africa conquer its famine of Rice was grown in some areas of southern Iraq. With the rise of Islam it moved north to Nisibin, the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and then beyond the Muslim world into the valley of Volga. In Egypt , rice is mainly grown in the Nile Delta. In Palestine, rice came to be grown in the Jordan Valley.
Rice is also grown in Yemen. The Moors brought Asiatic rice to the Iberian Peninsula in the 10th century. Records indicate it was grown in Valencia and Majorca. In Majorca, rice cultivation seems to have stopped after the Christian conquest, although historians are not certain.
Muslims also brought rice to Sicily, where it was an important crop long before it is noted in the plain of Pisa or in the Lombard plain , where its cultivation was promoted by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and demonstrated in his model farms.
After the 15th century, rice spread throughout Italy and then France , later propagating to all the continents during the age of European exploration.
The Ottomans introduced rice to the Balkans. Rice is not native to the Americas but was introduced to Latin America and the Caribbean by European colonizers at an early date with Spanish colonizers introducing Asian rice to Mexico in the s at Veracruz and the Portuguese and their African slaves introducing it at about the same time to Colonial Brazil.
Recent scholarship suggests that enslaved Africans played an active role in the establishment of rice in the New World and that African rice was an important crop from an early period.
Varieties of rice and bean dishes that were a staple dish along the peoples of West Africa remained a staple among their descendants subjected to slavery in the Spanish New World colonies, Brazil and elsewhere in the Americas. The Native Americans of what is now the Eastern United States may have practiced extensive agriculture with forms of wild rice. References to wild rice in the Americas are to the unrelated Zizania palustris. From the enslaved Africans, plantation owners learned how to dyke the marshes and periodically flood the fields.
At first the rice was milled by hand with wooden paddles, then winnowed in sweetgrass baskets the making of which was another skill brought by slaves from Africa. The invention of the rice mill increased profitability of the crop, and the addition of water power for the mills in by millwright Jonathan Lucas was another step forward.
Rice culture in the southeastern U. Today, people can visit the only remaining rice plantation in South Carolina that still has the original winnowing barn and rice mill from the midth century at the historic Mansfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina. Chinese archaeologists began excavating Shangshan in the early s. They quickly found evidence of a rice-dependent diet: rice husks buried in pottery shards and stone tools that looked like they were used for milling.
But far more abundant than artifacts are phytoliths, which are ubiquitous, if microscopic, in soil. Less than a tenth of an ounce of soil might yield thousands of phytoliths, says Dolores Piperno , a phytolith expert at the Smithsonian who was not involved in the study. So the Chinese team went through the tedious process of sifting the phytoliths from dirt, washing and sieving and heating until they ended up with a white powder of pure phytolith.
They then used carbon dating to pinpoint the age of phytoliths found at different depths in the excavation. The oldest material was as old as 9, years. Then they peered at the phytoliths under the microscope. The rice that the people cultivated at Shangshan 9, years ago was not like the rice we eat today.
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