Abstract
AbstractModern genetics, ecology and archaeology are combined to reconstruct the domestication and diversification of rice. Early rice cultivation followed two pathways towards domestication in India and China, with selection for domestication traits in early Yangtzejaponicaand a non-domestication feedback system inferred for ‘proto-indica’. The protracted domestication process finished around 6,500–6,000 years ago in China and about two millennia later in India, when hybridization with Chinese rice took place. Subsequently farming populations grew and expanded by migration and incorporation of pre-existing populations. These expansions can be linked to hypothetical language family dispersal models, including dispersal from China southwards by the Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian groups. In South Asia much dispersal of rice took place after Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers adopted rice from speakers of lost languages of northern India.
Highlights
Rice as food and crop is central to the identities of many Asian societies, most mainstream state cultures in East, Southeast and South Asia, from the Japanese to Sichuanese, to the Thai or Sri Lankan Sinhala see rice as a core part of their cultural tradition
This study, does not sway me from my conclusion about the evidence for a proto-indica exploited in India before the introduction and hybridization with improved japonica, but instead it reinforces the need for a fossil record, namely archaeobotany, to play critic to the computer-generated art of modelling, and to remind us that samples from the modern time plane can never capture lost genetic diversity of extirpated wild and cultivated lines of the past (Fig. 2)
The available weed data from the Ganges suggest that early rice cultivation was essentially dry cropping, based on monsoon rains and seasonal flood recession, but that plausible wet field irrigated rice may have been grown by the end of the second millennium BC and certainly by the Iron Age (Fuller and Qin 2009)
Summary
Rice as food and crop is central to the identities of many Asian societies, most mainstream state cultures in East, Southeast and South Asia, from the Japanese to Sichuanese, to the Thai or Sri Lankan Sinhala see rice as a core part of their cultural tradition. This study, does not sway me from my conclusion about the evidence for a proto-indica exploited in India before the introduction and hybridization with improved japonica, but instead it reinforces the need for a fossil record, namely archaeobotany, to play critic to the computer-generated art of modelling, and to remind us that samples from the modern time plane can never capture lost genetic diversity of extirpated wild and cultivated lines of the past (Fig. 2).
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