More Figgy News: The Earliest Domesticate?

The ancient fig story (namely evidence of fig tree propagation in the Mediterranean pushed back to between 10,500 to 11,700 years before the present), although definitely early and interesting, is not the earliest evidence for agricultural domestication in the world. I'm always interested to see how the press covers an archaeological story, especially one I've looked at in some detail. The ancient fig story has piqued some interest around the globe. Here are some of the stories recently reported:

• Scott Norris in National Geographic | Ancient Fig Find May Push Back Birth of Agriculture
• Rebecca Morelle in BBC News | Ancient fig clue to first farming
• Roger Field in the Telegraph | Was fig first fruit of man's agricultural endeavours?

All of these stories report that given this information, the fig would now be considered the earliest domesticated crop. But I was pretty sure when I wrote my story, that I'd seen at least one or maybe two references to Chinese rice agriculture (dry, not paddy) at about the same date. Today I went looking and found this:

Zhang Wenxu & Yuan Jiarong, "A Preliminary Study of Ancient Excavated Rice from Yuchanyan Site, Dao County, Hunan Province, PR China. Acta Agronomica Sinica, 1998(24-4):416-420. This report is of four grains of cultivated rice found at a site dated 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.

My main source of information on Chinese archaeology is Yang's 2004 encyclopedic New Perspectives on China's Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century (ISBN 0300096348 Yale University, two volumes).

Yang says (volume 1, pages 54-55) that according to the latest information, rice cultivation (dry) began in the Yangzi River valley, based on the recovery of plant pollen and phytoliths from two sites, Xianrendong in Wannian, Jiangxi Province; and Yuchanyan in Daoxian, Hunan Province. The earliest levels at the cave site of Xianrendong have only Oryza nirvana (the wild form), but between 14,000 and 11,000 BP, both O. nirvana and O. sativa (the cultivated form) show up, and after 11,000 BP, the cultivated form dominates the assemblages. The progession listed here is standard archaeological evidence of the adoption of a new cultigen. Yang also mentions the report that rice grains were recovered at Yuchanyan.

I'll ask around some more (and if you know anything more particular, please let me know), but for the moment I'm sticking by my statement that the new fig dates are 'roughly coeval' with rice cultivation.

Here's my piece: Early Domestication of Fig Trees. Feel free to leave a comment if you know something. The figs illustrated here are from the right, an ancient fig (coated with gold for SEM analysis), a commercial Iranian fig, and a Turkish fig. Photo copyright 2006, Jonathon Reif.