Rice and Maize Domestication
Farmers in China turned wild rice into a crop and farmers in Mexico turned the grass teosinte into maize, about 9,000 years ago; today these two grains feed billions of people.
Open in the interactive tree →Asian rice was domesticated from wild Oryza rufipogon in the Yangtze region of China, about 9,000 years ago by one estimate (the range given runs from 13,500 to 8,200 years ago). Maize descends from Balsas teosinte and was domesticated once, in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago; it changed so much that its kernels no longer fall off the cob, so it cannot spread without people. Rice now feeds over half of the world's population and maize is the grain harvested in the greatest weight (about 1,162 million tonnes in 2020), and their spread later drove the Columbian Exchange and the Green Revolution.
Prerequisites
- Farming (Neolithic Revolution)~9500 BCSowing and harvesting grasses began independently in China and Mexico.
Unlocks
- Columbian Exchange of Crops & Animals1492Maize was already a staple of the Americas when it crossed the Atlantic after 1492.
- Green Revolution1960sGreen Revolution rice was bred from the crop farmers had domesticated.
- C4 Rice / Better PhotosynthesisopenThe goal is to give rice the photosynthesis of maize, two long-domesticated crops.
Sources
More in Agriculture & Food · Prehistory
- Farming (Neolithic Revolution)~9500 BC
- Granaries & Grain Storage~9300 BC
- Animal Domestication~9000 BC
- Fermented Food and Drink~7000 BC
- Irrigation~6000 BC
- The Plough~3500 BC