Rice
Domesticated in the Yangtze valley, it becomes the staple of more people than any other crop.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.5 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 500 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Wild rice is exploited along the Yangtze from the end of the Pleistocene and shows domestication traits by around 6500 BCE, with a second independent domestication of African rice in the Niger delta much later. Wet rice cultivation is extraordinarily productive per hectare but extremely labour-intensive, and the paddy systems it requires shape settlement, landholding and social organisation across East and Southeast Asia for millennia.