The Onset of Agriculture and Northeast Asian Neolithic Farm Culture

Abstract

AbstractIn the history of humanity, the beginning of agriculture is estimated to have occurred in the Near East, East Asia, and Central and South America at around the same time, about 12,000 years before present (YBP). Regions with a historically independent civilization are making efforts to discover the origins of their food culture. Europe, which developed archeological digs and analyses relatively early, asserts that wheat and barley were first grown in Mesopotamia, and that goats, sheep, and cattle were also first domesticated in that region. Russian plant breeder Vavilov (1887–1943) argued that rice originated in India, but archeological studies in China, which began in the early 1900s, about a century later than Europe, show that China preceded India in cultivating rice for the first time. On the Korean Peninsula, where archeological studies were initiated half a century later than Japan or China, the discovery of rice seeds at Soro-ri that are estimated to have been cultivated around 12,500 BCE, have challenged theories of the origin of rice cultivation once again. In this chapter, the history of agriculture, especially rice and soybean cultivation in East Asia was reviewed.