Abstract
Moving crops outside of their original centers of domestication was sometimes a challenging process. Because of its substantial heat requirements, moving rice agriculture outside of its homelands of domestication was not an easy process for farmers in the past. Using crop niche models, we examine the constraints faced by ancient farmers and foragers as they moved rice to its most northerly extent in Ancient China: Shandong province. Contrary to previous arguments, we find that during the climatic optimum rice could have been grown in the region. Climatic cooling following this date had a clear impact on the distribution of rice, one that may have placed adaptive pressure on rice to develop a temperate phenotype. Following the development of this temperate phenotype, rice agriculture could once again become implanted in select areas of north-eastern China.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0130430 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 30 2015 |
Funding
Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is grateful to support from an ACLS/Luce Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. Guiyun Jin’s work is supported by the CAS Strategic Priority Research Program (Grant No. XDA05130603-B) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11AZD116). R. Kyle Bocinsky’s work is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. BCC-1439603, DGE-1347973, and DEB-0816400). All authors are grateful to Ethan Butler who assisted in the development of these original models and to Chinese archaeologists in Shandong whose have systematically gathered the data that contributed to the formation of this manuscript over the past decade. We thank Dong Guanghui and one anonymous reviewer for his insightful comments that helped improve the quality of this manuscript.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| 483 DEB-0816400 | |
| DEB-0816400, BCC-1439603, DGE-1347973, 1439516 | |
| Chinese Academy of Sciences | XDA05130603-B |
| 11AZD116 |