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Abstract The middle and lower Yangtze River region is internationally recognised as a core centre of rice agricultural origins, and research on rice domestication therein is fundamental to understanding the subsistence base and early social evolution of East Asian civilisations. Over more than a century, scholarly consensus has shifted markedly—from the Indian origin hypothesis and the South China hypothesis to the prevailing view favouring the middle and lower Yangtze. Discoveries at sites such as Hemudu, Pengtoushan, Yuchanyan, Xianrendong—Diaotonghuan, and Shangshan have pushed the history of rice cultivation in China back to before 10 000 BP, and have preliminarily established a spatiotemporal framework spanning wild rice utilisation, incipient domestication, and the establishment of ricebased agriculture.
Current research, however, faces three major bottlenecks. First, early Neolithic sites have yielded extremely scarce macro-botanical remains due to limitations imposed by poor preservation and early excavation dates. This has resulted in significant chronological and spatial gaps in our understanding of domestication rates and subsistence patterns across the middle and lower Yangtze, and has hindered the integration of crossregional lines of evidence. Second, ongoing debates persist over whether rice cultivation arose independently in different subregions or spread from one centre, and over whether domestication rates were uniform; the regional modes of development thus remain to be systematically clarified.
To address these challenges, microCT analysis of plant impressions in charcoaltempered pottery offers a novel pathway. Such pottery—fabricated with plant temper including rice husks and stalks—is abundant at early and middle Neolithic sites in the region. The plant impressions preserved within the ceramic fabric can be examined nondestructively through highresolution threedimensional reconstruction at a resolution of 0.01 mm, allowing precise retrieval of morphological details of rice grains, spikelet bases, and noncrop plants (e.g., acorns and barnyard grass), thereby effectively compensating for the scarcity of macro-botanical remains. Using this approach, the team from Zhejiang University has identified imprints of awned rice grains in early Shangshan cultural pottery sherds, confirming that rice domestication was underway in the lower Yangtze by approximately 10 000 BP. The concurrent discovery of numerous acorn and barnyard grass imprints further indicates that early farmers adopted a mixed subsistence strategy, which combined rice cultivation with broadspectrum resource use, offers critical evidence for understanding the complex driving mechanisms of agricultural origins.
Looking ahead, future work should focus on three aspects: (i) standardising domestication indicators by establishing quantifiable and comparable morphological and statistical criteria that integrate spikeletbase, phytolith, and the data of imprints ; (ii) systematically undertaking microCT scanning of charcoaltempered pottery from different periods and subregions of the middle and lower Yangtze, coupled with luminescence dating and archaeological cultural sequences, to finely reconstruct the spatiotemporal trajectories and regional variations in domestication rates; and (iii) strengthening interdisciplinary collaborations among archaeobotany, palaeoenvironmental studies, and settlement archaeology, so as to explore the driving mechanisms—environmental stress, demographic pressure, and cultural choice—underlying the rice domestication.
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Published: 08 September 2026
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