The Domestication Process and Domestication Rate in Rice

Spikelet Bases from the Lower Yangtze

Fuller, Dorian Q
Qin, Ling
Zheng, Yunfei
Zhao, Zhijun
Chen, Xugao
Hosoya, Leo Aoi
Sun, Guo-Ping

¹Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H OPY, UK. ²School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China. ³Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics, Hangzhou 310014, China. ⁴Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100710, China. ⁵Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto 603-8047, Japan.
^*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]

30 September 2008; accepted 4 February 2009

Supporting Online Materialwww.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5921/1607/DC1 Materials and Methods Figs. S1 and S2 References

Science 323(5921):p 1607-1610, March 20, 2009.

The process of rice domestication occurred in the Lower Yangtze region of Zhejiang, China, between 6900 and 6600 years ago. Archaeobotanical evidence from the site of Tianluoshan shows that the proportion of nonshattering domesticated rice (Oryza sativa) spikelet bases increased over this period from 27% to 39%. Over the same period, rice remains increased from 8% to 24% of all plant remains, which suggests an increased consumption relative to wild gathered foods. In addition, an assemblage of annual grasses, sedges, and other herbaceous plants indicates the presence of arable weeds, typical of cultivated rice, that also increased over this period.