China Confirmed as Source of Rice Culture

It is a compelling coincidencethat human agriculture emerged approximately 9000 years ago in six separatecenters around the globe including those of North America.  There may be some debate in terms of thisassertion, but I observe that I am seeing continuing convergence to what is atbest the same time frame.

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

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

I have posted extensively on thistopic and it is worth the effort to wade through related posts on thissite.  My conjecture is thatapproximately 9000 to 10,000 years ago, once the climate of the Holocene hadfully established itself after the Pleistocene Nonconformity around 13,000years 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 numberof locations sufficiently removed from each other to avoid early conflict.

This conjecture is obviouslycontroversial and it is also possible that the agricultural idea simply becamepractical at much the same time which may also be true.  Whatever happened, the succeeding fourthousand years saw a huge population rise occur as mankind exploited hisoptions through agriculture.

The other compelling argument infavor of the deliberate insertion conjecture is that the grains we use arealmost all produced by an unusual and generally unnatural application of acertain type of forced hybridization we have only even understood in the lastcentury or so.

Genetic study says Chinasource 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 domesticatedrice may have appeared as far back as around 9,000 years ago in China.

Previous studies had suggested domesticated rice may have had twopoints of origin, IndiaandChina, but genetic evidencepoints to China as the oldersource of the crop species, a release from New York Universitysaid Monday.

The study supports archaeological evidence gathered in the last decadepointing to rice domestication in the YangtzeValley beginning approximately 8,000to 9,000 years ago, while domestication of rice in the India's Ganges region beganaround about 4,000 years ago.

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

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

"As rice was brought in from Chinato Indiaby traders and migrant farmers, it likely hybridized extensively withlocal wildrice," NYU biologist Michael Purugganan, one of the study'sco-authors, said. "So domesticated rice that we may have once thoughtoriginated in India actuallyhas its beginnings in China."

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