China:New research shows that China's staple food, rice, has been cultivated in the country for a lot longer than previously thought - Stone Age man in eastern China planted rice in paddy fields 7,750 years ago.
Previously, the first fully domesticated rice in China had been dated to 6,000 years ago.
It's hard to overstate the importance of rice in China - it is the national dish, the word for food ("fan") is used for rice and the Chinese are the most famous rice eaters in the world.
The discovery sheds valuable new light on how human beings made the change from hunter-gatherers into farmers and also shows how human beings have wrestled with climate change throughout the centuries.
Dr Zong Yongqiang from Durham University, working with Chinese researchers at the Neolithic site of Kuahuqiao near the eastern city of Hangzhou, has discovered evidence of rice being grown in the coastal marshland nearly eight millenniums ago. The findings are published in the latest issue of Nature magazine.
The revelations about rice cultivation come from Kuahuqiao in Zhejiang province, a famous Neolithic site near Hangzhou.
It is a village of wooden dwellings perched on stilts over marshy wetlands which has yielded some of the most important discoveries about Stone Age life, including an 8,000-year-old drill used to make fire and a dug-out canoe made of pine with three paddles.
"The site provided us with evidence for the earliest rice cultivation," Dr Zong said in a telephone interview. "The site had been already examined by archaeologists, but we were doing an ecological study of the site. We found the level of human manipulation to the environment in this area was quite high."
The scientists examined pollen, fungus and charcoal and found no sign of increasing saltiness, from which they were able to work out that the inhabitants probably erected low earthen dykes, called bunds, to keep the seawater out so that it did not damage the rice.
"They had a lot of knowledge and skills, such as using charcoal to make fire to clear and maintain the area, and building dykes to keep the rising water out," Dr Zong said.
The archaeological remains at Kuahuqiao were unearthed during the building of a brick factory in the early 1970s. The site was waterlogged, so many of the organic artefacts were well preserved. It also yielded up the bones of dogs and pigs, which provide evidence of domestication.
The research also shows just how ancient is the phenomenon of climate change and the difficulties that the human race has found in dealing with it throughout the centuries. Eventually the village succumbed to the rising sea level as climate change pushed up temperatures and the village was engulfed by water.