China Confirmed as Source of Rice Culture

It is a compelling coincidence that human agriculture emerged approximately 9000 years ago in six separate centers around the globe including those of North America.  There may be some debate in terms of this assertion, but I observe that I am seeing continuing convergence to what is at best the same time frame.

I have argued that this ‘impulse’ was initiated by the insertion of specially prepared human stock (us) at appropriate locations around the globe with at initial stock of seeds and perhaps additional kit.  The best known such event was the establishment of the Noah colony at Ararat.  At least we retain a record of it.

Now we have tidied up the appropriate time frame for the Chinese colony and also shown that natural expansion did not necessitate contact with India for the first five thousand years.  Again this makes good sense as India had its own colony(s) with its own emergent agricultural tool kit.  We discover that the advent of Chinese rice induced hybridization with indigenous wild rice varieties and this helped localize Indian strains about 4000 years ago or just as the seaborne Bronze Age emerged.

I have posted extensively on this topic and it is worth the effort to wade through related posts on this site.  My conjecture is that approximately 9000 to 10,000 years ago, once the climate of the Holocene had fully established itself after the Pleistocene Nonconformity around 13,000 years ago had ended the Ice Age, our space brethren who are of Terran descent, jump started agriculture on Earth by establishing modern human colonies at a number of locations sufficiently removed from each other to avoid early conflict.

This conjecture is obviously controversial and it is also possible that the agricultural idea simply became practical at much the same time which may also be true.  Whatever happened, the succeeding four thousand years saw a huge population rise occur as mankind exploited his options through agriculture.

The other compelling argument in favor of the deliberate insertion conjecture is that the grains we use are almost all produced by an unusual and generally unnatural application of a certain type of forced hybridization we have only even understood in the last century or so.

Genetic study says China source of rice

by Staff Writers

New York (UPI) May 2, 2011 

http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Genetic_study_says_China_source_of_rice_999.html

Genome researchers tracking the evolutionary history of rice say domesticated rice may have appeared as far back as around 9,000 years ago in China.

Previous studies had suggested domesticated rice may have had two points of origin, Indiaand China, but genetic evidence points to China as the older source of the crop species, a release from New York University said Monday.

The study supports archaeological evidence gathered in the last decade pointing to rice domestication in the Yangtze Valley beginning approximately 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, while domestication of rice in the India's Ganges region began around about 4,000 years ago.

The researchers examined the history of domesticated rice by re-sequencing 630 gene fragments on selected chromosomes from a diverse set of wild and domesticated rice varieties.

Their results showed that the gene sequence data was consistent with a single origin of rice.

"As rice was brought in from China to India by traders and migrant farmers, it likely hybridized extensively with local wild rice," NYU biologist Michael Purugganan, one of the study's co-authors, said. "So domesticated rice that we may have once thought originated in India actually has its beginnings in China."

Asian rice, Oryza sativa, is one of world's oldest crop species.