Pacific Voyagers Transported Rice Across Vast Ocean Stretch

Archaeology Magazine ^ | June 30, 2025 | editors / unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

According to a statement released by The Australian National University (ANU), researchers have identified the earliest known evidence of rice in the Pacific Islands. Rice was originally domesticated in central China 9,000 years ago, but it took thousands of years for it to reach the Marianas Island in western Micronesia. Phytolith analysis of microscopic plant debris found on pottery from the Ritidian Beach Cave in northern Guam indicated that rice arrived there at least 3,500 years ago. Previously, the earliest known evidence of rice in the remote Pacific dated to between 1,000 and 700 years ago, so this discovery pushes the timeline back significantly. Since there are no traces of rice fields, irrigation systems, or harvesting tools at the site, it is believed that ancient Pacific islanders transported rice with them from the Philippines across 1,400 miles of open ocean. "It demonstrates not only their advanced navigation skills but also their foresight in preserving and transporting precious resources across vast distances," said ANU researcher Hsiao-chun Hung. "It highlights how important rice must have been." Experts believe that because rice would have been such a precious commodity at this time, it was not consumed daily but instead reserved for special ritual use. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. To read how rice terraces helped the Ifugao resist Spanish colonization, go to "Letter from the Philippines: One Grain at a Time."

---

TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: agriculture; ancientnavigation; china; dietandcuisine; godsgravesglyphs; guam; marianas; micronesia; pacific; philippines; rice; ritidianbeachcave

[SunkenCiv]

Rice husk phytoliths

Carson et al. 2025, Science Advances

[SunkenCiv]

[chajin]

"Letter from the Philippines: One Grain at a Time."

One grain at a time, sweet Jesus
That's all I'm asking from You
Just give me a grain
Brown rice or plain
That's all You need do...

[Flaming Conservative]

Interesting.

[absalom01]

Put another way, neolithic people weren’t able to survive such a long voyage until they figured out how to bring along sufficient supplies of food, and keep it dry and on board their boat until they made landfall.

Pretty impressive, nonetheless. The equivalent of a voyage to Mars today. Maybe even a bigger lift — they didn’t know that anything was out there at all, let alone where land might be found. One imagines that they were driven by great need or desperation, along with substantial courage and ingenuity.

[GingisK]

The equivalent of a voyage to Mars today.

Uh, no. All they had to do is gather up material that floats for making a boat, store food in watertight containers, and then sail away. That is a far cry from a mission to Mars.

[one guy in new jersey]

“Rice was originally domesticated in central China 9,000 years ago”

TWEEEEEEET!

Biblical timeline violation.

[absalom01]

Ah!

Let’s steelman that admittedly stretched analogy.

Let’s say you’re a neolithic hunter-gatherer, with some rudimentary agriculture of sorts. It’s not just finding some stuff that floats, you’ve got to develop the technology to build a boat that can survive pelagic conditions. It’ll probably be some sort of big, double-hull dugout canoe with a bridge-deck of some sort, and some kind of sail power. You’ll have a good knowledge of the night sky already, but you’ll have to apply that to navigation problems so you’re not sailing in circles.

Now for storing food and fresh water — you can’t just put that in a woven wicker basket, the grain will get soaked before you launch your ship, so you have to develop some kind of clay storage vessel (as was discussed in the piece posted).

All of that R+D, with stone, wood, and bone tools, and no math or written language is probably going to take more than one human lifetime, so you’ve got to figure out some way to transmit knowledge for the design team for at least two or three generations, all while fending of enemies, wild animals, and putting food on the hearth while you develop this wild as-yet-unheardof technology.

And yet, it was somehow within reach, but only barely as evidenced by how long it took to get from the mainland to the islands.

We won’t take another thousand years to get to Mars, or other places in the solar system, but is it really a bigger challenge, at least in terms of the human spirit? After all, we know Mars is there, and have a very good idea of what it’s like. We’re just choosing to not go because it’s either too expensive, too much trouble, or we don’t see the payoff.

Surely at least some of these Stone-Age mariners were driven by a spirit of adventure, a quest for glory perhaps, as they set sail into the rising sun?

[PUGACHEV]

There is only one way that it might be helpful to compare a pre-historic voyage of over 1,500 miles across the open ocean with our challenge of landing a human on Mars. Both stretch the limits of existing technology and involve great risk to those brave enough to make the attempt. The pre-historic sailor needed so much more than a vessel which could float. He had to have some type of sail and the skill to use it. He needed to navigate far from land without anything aside from his talent of reading the winds and current to guide him. He needed to know how to provision himself for a voyage of uncertain length. Finally, he needed to know how to profit from the voyage; otherwise, there would be no reason to take the many risks involved.

[MikelTackNailer]

Double handy, for when the occasional big wave soaked the boat they had that rice to quickly dry out their cell phones.

[bunkerhill7]

They probably went earlier across land bridges before the big floods. Occam’s Razor says so. It’s the easiest way...

[The_Harlequin]

Vert true, actually. We know exactly where Mars is and how to get there. The early Pacific explorers didn’t know where they were going and where they would end up. Easy peasy.

[No name given]

Very.

[GingisK]

Boats may have been in use for 1,000 years before they attempted that trip.

[GingisK]

Going to Mars is the result of an amalgamation of knowledge and experience stemming back to those ancient times. The Spirit of Exploration combined with innovation through the millenniums is how we go to Mars. The trip to Mars is the summation of what has gone before; therefore, the greatest of all of them.

[gleeaikin]

“Surely at least some of these Stone-Age mariners were driven by a spirit of adventure, a quest for glory perhaps”

Then again, perhaps they were the second son of the area ruler, who had already given the woman he desired to his older brother. Part of the success of British colonialism was that only the oldest son could inherit estates. The younger sons had to go find some kind of job. Frequently the military, the priesthood, an overseas job, or an adventure like exploring.

[Red Badger]

Didn’t that apply only to titled nobility?..............

[Red Badger]

Didn’t that apply only to titled nobility?..............

[absalom01]

Then again, the first liquid-fueled rocket flew less than a hundred years ago — March 16, 1926.

So ~one order of magnitude faster. Not bad, I guess, but I would have hoped for better, tbh.

[Verginius Rufus]

The early Guamanians were able to sail across 1400 miles of ocean to get rice. But they knew enough not to stockpile so much that it would cause Guam to tip over.