New Delhi: Fossils of microscopic algae found near an ancient lake in Uttar Pradesh suggest that people cultivated paddy there about 9,000 years ago, adding fresh evidence for the independent domestication of rice in China and India, scientists have said.
The scientists at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleosciences (BSIP) in Lucknow say their study of the algae microfossils called "diatoms" associated with paddy fields point to the presence of cultivated rice near Lahuradewa lake in eastern Uttar Pradesh about 9,000 years ago.
A team of Chinese and Canadian archaeologists had two years ago described plant remains, including residues of rice, dated to between 9,000 and 8,400 years ago, representing the earliest evidence for domestication of rice in the Yangtze valley.
"The evidence from Lahuradewa supports earlier suggestions that domestication of rice occurred in parallel in China and India," Rakesh Tewari , a senior archaeologist and former project director of the Archaeological Survey of India's excavations at Lahuradewa told The Telegraph.
Tewari, who was not associated with the new BSIP study, said differences of a few hundred years from a single site should not be used to claim domestication of rice may have taken place in India even before it did in China.
Paleobotanist Biswajit Thakur and his colleagues at the BSIP analysed the distribution of diatoms across excavated areas around the Lahuradewa lake which has long been recognised as a site of ancient cultivation.
"We looked specifically at the distribution of diatoms associated with paddy fields - these algae are like signatures for rice cultivation," Thakur told The Telegraph. "The rise and fall in the populations of diatoms coincides beautifully with conditions conducive and not conducive for rice cultivation."
Their study, published this week in Current Science, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, has found increases in diatoms along the margins of the lake when environmental conditions were favourable for paddy cultivation and decreases when conditions were unfavourable.
The earlier excavations by Tewari and his colleagues had already recovered phytoliths, or fossil remains of rice plants, from around the Lahuradewa lake area dated up to 8,300 years ago.
The BSIP researchers believe the lake's margins with between 10cm and 20cm deep water were used as paddy fields. "Even today, we see lake margins used for paddy cultivation," Thakur said.
Two years ago, a study by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, had shown that farmers in the Indus valley civilisation had independently domesticated rice as an annual summer crop.
"Rice is a staple across eastern and southeastern Asia and the subcontinent - it is possible the domestication process occurred at multiple sites," Tewari said.
