Domestication of Rice and Millets

China has a long agricultural history. About 20,000 years ago, people began to consciously manage certain wild plants; around 10,000 years ago the earliest cultivated crops appeared. In the middle and lower Yangtze, people began to grow rice, and sites such as Xianrendong–Diaotonghuan in Wannian, Jiangxi, Yuchanyan in Daoxian, Hunan, and Shangshan in Pujiang, Zhejiang, have yielded early rice remains dated to about 12,000–10,000 years ago. In the north, people began growing drought-tolerant foxtail millet and broomcorn millet; sites such as Donghulin in Mentougou, Beijing, and Xinglongwa in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, have produced cultivated millet remains dated to about 10,000–8,000 years ago. The world's earliest cultivated rice, foxtail millet and broomcorn millet have all been found in China, an important contribution by early Chinese to human civilization. Over the following two thousand years or more, a pattern of “rice in the south, millet in the north” gradually took shape. Farming methods developed from slash-and-burn to tillage with soil-turning tools such as the lei and si, and agriculture came to occupy a growing share of daily life. People also began raising pigs, dogs and chickens. The growth of crop planting, livestock raising, settled villages and polished stone tools marks the rise of primitive agriculture, which laid the material basis for population growth, the division of labor and the formation of ancient civilization. Rice farming later spread to East and Southeast Asia and profoundly influenced world agriculture; rice and millet remain important staple crops in China today.