Rice Through the Millennia

The two main cultivated species of rice, Oryza sativa (Asian rice) and Oryza glaberrima (African rice), first developed from wild species. Rice has been growing wild for millennia, and still does in many parts of Asia and Africa. The first evidence of rice cultivation is hard to pin down, but authorities seem to agree that somewhere in the region stretching from southern China across Thailand and Burma to Assam, the species Oryza sativa developed and was cultivated by early groups of people about seven thousand years ago. First written records of rice are Chinese and date from five thousand years ago; archaeological rice remains from India and Thailand date from about the same period. These early cultivators seem to have grown both indica (long-grain tropical) and japonica (medium-grain temperate) types of rice. The first cultivation was probably dryland cultivation, perhaps on the damp edge of a riverbank, perhaps on lowlying wetlands on valley floors.