For thousands of years, rice has been one of the most important agricultural crops in the world.

It's fed billions of people, has been cross-bred into tens of thousands of variants,

and has now grown in every country except Antarctica.

The importance of rice has not diminished over time and in fact

might grow in the future. Learn more about rice, how it was domesticated and spread around the world

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. When I previously did an episode on the history of bread, the origin of wheat had a pretty defined area that we think it came from.

It was somewhere around the fertile crescent and maybe eastern Turkey.

Pinning down the origin of rice isn't nearly as simple. The strain of rice in question is known as

Oriza cestiva, which is more commonly known as Asian rice. The vast majority of

the thousands of variants of rice that exist today all came from the wild strain of this species.

And just to complicate things there are two subspecies.

Oresis sativa Japonica, which is found in China, and Oresisotiva Indica, which is found in China, and Ariza Sativa Indica, which is found in India.

For decades there were competing theories as to the origin of Rice.

One theory held that it originated in China, somewhere near the Yangtze River, and the other held that it came from India, somewhere

probably in the north.

There is archaeological evidence for rice in both India and China, dating back thousands

of years.

The oldest evidence for India goes back about 4,500 years ago.

However, four grains of rice were found in the Yu-chan Yan cave in the Hunan province of China,

which dates back 12,000 to 16,000 years ago.

This debate was settled once and for all using a technique known as gene dating.

A 2011 paper found that all of the arises sativa rice that we know of came from a single domestication

...