Rice, one of the world's major staple foods sustaining more than half of the global population, was first domesticated in China about 10,000 years ago, a new study suggested on Monday.

 "Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would coincide with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change, when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene," said Lu Houyuan, leader of the study and professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Rice sustains more than half of the global population, and is one of the world's most important staple foods. /VCG Photo

The research, published in US publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research under the CAS.

The age of the rice fossils could be derived through radiocarbon dating of organic matter in pottery shards, which can be contaminated with older carbon sources. To constrain the age of the phytoliths, researchers have developed new ways of isolating rice phytoliths from carbon sources, such as clays and carbonate, and have successfully dated the samples directly using radiocarbon dating.

 A rice fossil found in Hunan Province. /VCG Photo

 At present, rice remains previously recovered from the Shangshan site in the Lower Yangtze of China are recognized as the earliest example of rice cultivation. According to Lu, the phytoliths retrieved from the early stage of the Shangshan site are about 9,400 years old.

This means that rice domestication may have begun at Shangshan around 10,000 years ago during the beginning of the Holocene period, when taking into account the distance between phytolith samples and the lowest bottom of cultural strata of the site as well as a slow rate of rice domestication, Lu said.

(Source: Xinhua)