The Middle East, near where the Tigris meets the Euphrates, has long been considered the “cradle of civilization,” but a series of new studies indicate that Chinese river valleys represent a second spot for the emergence of agriculture.

Genetic studies, using DNA from charred seeds gathered at the world’s first farms, are slowly rewriting the long-told story of how “civilization” began. In an essay in Science this week, Cambridge archaeologists Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu argue that millet spread west long before the Middle Eastern crops (wheat and barley) spread east.

More generally, they say that the Agricultural Revolution took place so slowly that it was probably imperceptible to those humans experiencing the transition. Early farmers continued to harvest wild rice varieties and the percentage of domesticated rice species that they the percentage of domesticated rice harvested versus wild rice increased just a few percent in a human lifespan.

“Rather than a revolutionary shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers in a few human generations, the evidence now suggests that many generations of ‘affluent foragers’ combined the gathering of wild fruits and nuts with the gathering of cultivated cereals,” write co-authors Martin Jones and Xinyi Liu.

Citation: “Origins of Agriculture in East Asia” by Martin K. Jones and Xinyi Liu. Science, Vol. 324, May 8, 2009.

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Image: Millet growing in northern China. flickr/gin_e

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