The origins of Rice

We all know that rice is an ancient food.In some parts of the world, the word "to eat" literally means "to eat rice."This explains that rice was the spoken language for food which also shows how old it really is. We recently discovered just how ancient it is. Rice was believed to have been first cultivated in China around 6,000 years ago, but recent archaeological discoveries have found primitive rice seeds and ancient farm tools dating back about 9,000 years. Archaeologists and botanists have long debated the origins of rice. For many archaeologists who focus on East Asia or Southeast Asia, it has long appeared that rice agriculture began in South-central China, somewhere along the Yangzte river, and spread from there southwards and to northeast towards Korea and Japan. However, archaeologists working in India have argued that their evidence suggests an origin of rice cultivation in the Ganges river valley, by peoples unconnected to those of the Yangzte. [the map summarized rice origins as part of Fuller's 2012 paper in the journal rice]

For both regions there are current controversies about how early rice was cultivated, and how best to identify when rice was domesticated as opposed to being gathered wild. For example, recently in India rice grains and early pottery found at the site of Lahuradewa in Uttar Pradesh dating to ca. 6500 BC, have been suggested to indicate very early rice cultivation about 4000 years earlier than has often been assumed for this region. However, other scholars contend that these early rice finds may have been collected from wild stands and further evidence is needed to prove cultivation or domestication. Similarly, in Chinese archaeology it has been assumed that early rice finds of ca. 7000 BC were cultivated, but previous methods of sample analysis did not establish evidence either for cultivation behaviors or for the physical domestication traits in rice. For example most studies on early rice in China have been based on recovered archaeological grains, which may not be the most informative on whether or a not a plant is domesticated.( Source debating the origins of Rice ) For the greater part of its long history, rice was a staple only in Asia. Not until Arab travelers introduced rice into ancient Greece, and Alexander the Great brought it to India, did rice find its way to other parts of the world. Subsequently, the Moors brought rice to Spain in the 8th century during their conquests, while the Crusaders were responsible for bringing rice to France.Rice was introduced into South America in the 17th century by the Spanish during their colonization of this continent. The majority of the world's rice is grown in Asia, where it plays an incredibly important role in their food culture. Thailand, Vietnam and China are the three largest exporters of rice. Rice is consumed by 2.7 billion Asians today, or half the world's population and with widespread inter-breeding and domestication of the crop, Asian wild rice populations no longer exist. Enable to secure future Rice we need to secure the grain face challenges from disease, or demand, will prove crucial to the future of the grain. Researchers from the University of QueenslandResearchers have found Wild Rice in Australia (Cape York peninsula). Professor Robert Henry: 'You can't underestimate the importance of rice to food security. This is key to sustaining that,'. 'We could reasonably expect that this could be a very important contribution to food security in the next 50 years.'