Millet in northern China
Foxtail and broomcorn millet support the Yellow River cultures where rice will not grow.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Millet is domesticated in the dry loess country of northern China by around 6500 BCE and becomes the staple of the Yangshao and later cultures — drought-tolerant, fast-maturing and suited to soils and rainfall that cannot sustain paddy rice. China therefore has two independent agricultural cores, a northern millet one and a southern rice one, and much of its early history is the interaction between them.