Food & agriculture · c. 7,000 BCE

Domesticated rice

Along the Yangtze, wild rice became Asia's staple and eventually the food of half of humanity.

Japonica rice was domesticated in the lower Yangtze valley, with sites such as Shangshan showing cultivation by roughly 7000 BCE. Flooded paddies later gave some of the highest sustained yields of any pre-modern farming system.

See it in the living treeWikipedia