粒粒皆辛苦 你必須瞭解的水稻前世今生!

Rice, one of the world's Most important staple foods sustaining more than half of the global population, was first domesticated in China about 10,000 years ago, a new study suggested last Monday.

水稻，是全世界最重要的主食之一，養活了全球一半以上的人口。據上週一的一項最新研究顯示，它首次被馴化是在10000年前的中國。

"Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would agree with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene," Lu Houyuan, professor of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the study, said.

中國科學院地質與地球物理研究所的呂厚遠教授領導了這項研究，他表示：“水稻種植與馴化如此早的時間，與世界上其他地區主要農作物開始馴化的時間基本同步，在這段時期內，更新世向全新世過渡，環境發生了顯著的變化。”

The research, published in the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done in collaboration with Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

這項研究由浙江省文物考古研究所、中科院地理科學與自然資源研究所合作完成，發表在美國《國家科學院學報》上。

Questions surrounding the origin and domestication of rice have led to a lot of debate in the last decade.

關於水稻的起源和馴化問題，在過去的十年間發生了諸多爭論。

Rice remains have previously been recovered from the Shangshan site in the Lower Yangtze of China and recognized as the earliest examples of rice cultivation.

此前，水稻化石在中國長江中下游上山遺址被提取到，被認爲是水稻種植最古老的例子。

However, the age of the rice fossils was derived through radiocarbon dating of organic matter in pottery shards, which can be contaminated with older carbon sources, Lu said.

但是據呂教授介紹，對其年代的判斷多來自從陶片中提取有機物的放射性碳測年結果，這類材料容易受古老的碳源的污染。

To constrain the age of the phytoliths, the researchers developed new ways of isolating rice phytoliths from carbon sources, such as clays and carbonate, and dated the samples directly using radiocarbon dating. It turned out that phytoliths retrieved from the early stage of the Shangshan site are about 9,400 years old.

爲了限制植物巖的年齡，研究人員開發了一種新的方法，將水稻的植物巖從碳源--例如粘土和碳酸鹽--中分離出來，並直接使用放射性碳測定年代來測定樣品。結果顯示，從上山遺址早期提取的植物巖約有9400年的歷史。

Further studies showed that approximately 36 percent of rice phytoliths at Shangshan had more than nine fish-scale decorations, less than the approximately 67 percent counted from modern domesticated rice, but larger than the approximately 17 percent found in modern wild rice.

進一步的研究表明，上山遺址大約36%的水稻植物巖有超過九條魚鱗斑裝飾，將近67%的水稻植物巖含有現代馴化水稻，比現代野生稻子中的17%的比例要高。

That means that rice domestication may have begun at Shangshan at about 10,000 years ago during the beginning of the Holocene, when taking into account the distance between phytolith samples and the lowest bottom of cultural strata of the site as well as a slow rate of rice domestication, Lu said.

呂厚遠表示，考慮到上山遺址早期植物巖的樣本離最下部地層底部的距離以及水稻緩慢馴化的速率，這意味着，水稻開始在上山遺址馴化的年代應該大致在距今約1萬年前的全新世開始時期。

The time coincided with the domestication of wheat in the Near East and maize in northern South America, both of which are also believed to have occurred at about 10,000 years ago, when the global climate experienced dramatic changes from cold glacial to warm interglacial.

這個時間與中東的小麥、中美洲的玉米開始馴化的時間基本同步，它們都發生在約10000年前，當時全球氣發生顯著變化，從寒冷的冰川過渡到了暖溼的間冰期。