May 17, 2013 — Archaeologists have made a discovery in southern subtropical China which could revolutionise thinking about how ancient humans lived in the region. They have uncovered evidence for the first time that people living in Xincun 5,000 years ago may have practised agriculture -- before the arrival of domesticated rice in the region. Current archaeological thinking is that it was the advent of rice cultivation along the Lower Yangtze River that marked the beginning of agriculture in southern China. Poor organic preservation in the study region, as in many others, means that traditional archaeobotany techniques are not possible. Now, thanks to a new method of analysis on ancient grinding stones, the archaeologists have uncovered evidence that agriculture could predate the advent of rice in the region. The research was the result of a two-year collaboration between Dr Huw Barton, from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, and Dr Xiaoyan Yang, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Funded by a Royal Society UK-China NSFC International Joint Project, and other grants held by Yang in China, the research is published in PLOS ONE. Dr Barton, Senior Lecturer in Bioarchaeology at the University of Leicester, described the find as 'hitting the jackpot': "Our discovery is totally unexpected and very exciting. "We have used a relatively new method known as ancient starch analysis to analyse ancient human diet. This technique can tell us things about human diet in the past that no other method can. "From a sample of grinding stones we extracted very small quantities of adhering sediment trapped in pits and cracks on the tool surface. From this material, preserved starch granules were extracted with our Chinese colleagues in the starch laboratory in Beijing. These samples were analysed in China and also here at Leicester in the Starch and Residue Laboratory, School of Archaeology and Ancient History. "Our research shows us that there was something much more interesting going on in the subtropical south of China 5,000 years ago than we had first thought. The survival of organic material is really dependent on the particular chemical properties of the soil, so you never know what you will get until you sample. At Xincun we really hit the jackpot. Starch was well-preserved and there was plenty of it. While some of the starch granules we found were species we might expect to find on grinding and pounding stones, ie. some seeds and tuberous plants such as freshwater chestnuts, lotus root and the fern root, the addition of starch from palms was totally unexpected and very exciting." Several types of tropical palms store prodigious quantities of starch. This starch can be literally bashed and washed out of the trunk pith, dried as flour, and of course eaten. It is non-toxic, not particularly tasty, but it is reliable and can be processed all year round. Many communities in the tropics today, particularly in Borneo and Indonesia, but also in eastern India, still rely on flour derived from palms. Dr Barton said: "The presence of at least two, possibly three species of starch producing palms, bananas, and various roots, raises the intriguing possibility that these plants may have been planted nearby the settlement. "Today groups that rely on palms growing in the wild are highly mobile, moving from one palm stand to another as they exhaust the clump. Sedentary groups that utilise palms for their starch today, plant suckers nearby the village, thus maintaining continuous supply. If they were planted at Xincun, this implies that 'agriculture' did not arrive here with the arrival of domesticated rice, as archaeologists currently think, but that an indigenous system of plant cultivation may have been in place by the mid Holocene. "The adoption of domesticated rice was slow and gradual in this region; it was not a rapid transformation as in other places. Our findings may indicate why this was the case. People may have been busy with other types of cultivation, ignoring rice, which may have been in the landscape, but as a minor plant for a long time before it too became a food staple. "Future work will focus on grinding stones from nearby sites to see if this pattern is repeated along the coast." University of Leicester (2013, May 17). Agriculture in China predates domesticated rice: Discovery of ancient diet shatters conventional ideas of how agriculture emerged. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 17, 2013, from http://www.sciencedaily.com* /releases/2013/05/130517085734.htm
Fascinating but to me, unsurprising, for I've always believed that civilised humanity goes back far more than we give it credit for. Anyhow, also worthy of pursuit is the following book concening farming in China .. Farmers of Forty Centuries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_of_Forty_Centuries
Grains were not always the first cultivated plants, so the dawn of the Neolithic Era (the Late Stone Age, defined by the invention of the technology of agriculture, which both permitted and required humans to no longer be nomads) is not always marked by evidence of cultivated grains. In Mesopotamia, the first cultivated plant was the fig tree around 12KYA. In Mesoamerica, it was the pepper (some say squash) around 10KYA. Wikipedia says that we have plenty of evidence of cultivated rice and millet in China around 9KYA, so I don't know where you got your figure of 5KYA as the beginning of agriculture in that region. By that time they had already invented the technology of city-building and were on their way into the Bronze Age! You need to be more precise in your terminology. The first paradigm-shifting technology out of the Paleolithic Era was agriculture, the twin technologies of farming and animal husbandry. This created the first food surplus in history, and allowed rival tribes who no longer had to fight over resources in a lean year to make peace. It was soon discovered that division of labor and economies of scale make larger villages more productive than small ones, encouraging those no-longer-rival tribes to create larger villages by living together in harmony and cooperation. Civilization, literally "the building of cities," was the second paradigm-shifting technology. The first cities were built in Mesopotamia about 1000 years after the invention of agriculture, and the technology spread to Egypt, India and China in due course. The people in the New World had to invent it by themselves, so the first cities in Mesoamerica were not built until around 5KYA (give them a break, they had to do this with no draft animals), and in South America just a few centuries before the Christian occupation. Civilization caused a change in the way we deal each other, requiring us to live in harmony and cooperation with complete strangers. This also required a formal multi-level government, since one grandfather could no longer be in charge of everybody. Agriculture and civilization are not the same thing. The former is a precursor to the latter. Bronze metallurgy, iron metallurgy, industry (essentially the transformation of the chemical energy in fossil fuel into mechanical energy), and electronic communication (allowing and encouraging the entire human race to become a single civilization) are Paradigm Shifts #3 - 6. Not all historians count this way; Toffler, for example, ignores city-building and metallurgy and only counts three. What I see is a multiple-orders-of-magnitude increase in the productivity of human labor and a concomitant increase in total wealth, at each of the Paradigms I have counted.
Rice farming is pretty sophisticated and extraordinarily onerous, labor intensive work. It would surprise me if it were the first domesticated crop and the introduction to agriculture in a region - one would expect something more easily gardened or farmed or tended to be the gateway crop. It is very unlikely that early agriculture involved an increase in the productivity of human labor, or the first surpluses of food. What it created was the ability to store stuff - to average out the production of what was probably considerably less productive labor and its probably smaller surpluses, over longer times. It allowed people to sit in one place without starving to death, and that's where the accumulation of wealth starts to happen. It's not that former ways of life were incapable of producing surplus and wealth, much less that they had to work harder for a given return (quite the opposite), it's that they could only keep what they could carry with them. By the archaeological evidence, people become less well fed and shorter lived when they first take up farming. But they more consistently survive to reproduce.
