Abstract
Bulliform phytoliths play an important role in researching rice origins as they can be used to distinguish between wild and domesticated rice. Rice bulliform phytoliths are characterized by numerous small shallow fish-scale decorations on the lateral side. Previous studies have shown that domesticated rice has a larger number of these decorations than wild rice and that the number of decorations ≥9 is a useful feature for identifying domesticated rice. However, this standard was established based on limited samples of modern rice plants. In this study, we analyzed soil samples from both wild and domesticated rice paddies. Results showed that, in wild rice soil samples, the proportion of bulliform phytoliths with ≥9 decorations was 17.46% ± 8.29%, while in domesticated rice soil samples, the corresponding proportion was 63.70% ± 9.22%. This suggests that the proportion of phytoliths with ≥9 decorations can be adopted as a criterion for discriminating between wild and domesticated rice in prehistoric soil. This indicator will be of significance in improving the application of fish-scale decorations to research into rice origins and the rice domestication process.
Highlights
Rice (Oryza sativa) is among the world’s most important and ancient domesticated crops [1]
Bulliform phytoliths from wild rice field—Of all 29 wild rice soil samples, no rice bulliform phytoliths were found in samples Nos. 20, 25, and 29
Bulliform phytoliths from domesticated rice paddies—Rice bulliform phytoliths were found in all 30 domesticated rice paddy soil samples
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa) is among the world’s most important and ancient domesticated crops [1]. Some researchers believe that rice was domesticated 9,000–10,000 years ago, based on evidence from archaeological rice fossils and rice DNA [4,5,6,7,8,9,10], while others argue that the process of rice domestication is only known to have begun with certainty 8,000–7,700 years ago, based on the study of unearthed rice spikelet bases [11, 12]. One cause of this disagreement is the lack of unified standards for distinguishing between wild and domesticated archaeological rice remains, with this remaining an urgent problem in the research of rice origins [13].
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