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Cultivated Rice Kernel 12,000 Years Ago Discovered in Hunan The rice kernel discovered in the Yuchanyan cultural relics in Central China's Hunan Province may be the earliest cultivated rice specimen yet discovered, said archaeologists. During the excavation at the Yuchanyan cultural relics in Daoxian County at the end of 2004, six rice kernels were discovered. The age of one was confirmed at 12,000 years ago, a transitional period from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age (10,000 years ago), or even earlier, said Yuan Jiarong, director of the provincial archaeological research institute. The ages of other five grains, which were...

Andean Crops Cultivated Almost 10,000 Years Ago by Michael Abrams Archaeologists have long thought that people in the Old World were planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting for a good 5,000 years before anyone in the New World did such things. But fresh evidence, in the form of Peruvian squash seeds, indicates that farming in the New and Old Worlds was nearly concurrent. In a paper the journal Science published last June, Tom Dillehay, an anthropological archaeologist at Vanderbilt University, revealed that the squash seeds he found in the ruins of what may have been ancient storage bins on the lower...

India cultivated homegrown farmers Bruce Bower Approximately 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers living in what's now India adapted agricultural practices for their own purposes rather than giving way to an influx of foreign farmers, a new genetic study suggests. Y SPREAD. Maps of India and surrounding regions denote where a Y chromosome marker occurs more frequently (dark green) and less frequently (light green) in caste populations (larger map) and tribal groups (inset). Kashyap/PNAS Comparisons of men's Y chromosomes show that nearly all Indian men today, regardless of their tribe or caste, are descendants of populations that inhabited South Asia before agriculture's...