ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia is the home of rice. Although its origins may be elsewhere, it is in this region that technologies have been refined in the last millennium and where rice is synonymous with food in most languages. Beginning with selection of grains that did not naturally fall to the ground prior to ripening as an unconscious action of our forebears, rice was quickly domesticated1 as a rather narrow gene group was associated with the shattering of grain. Hence selecting plants that did not shatter led to exclusion of most of the other types-yet by coincidence an abscission layer that facilitated harvesting was retained. From such recent genetic work, we know now work tells us that rice, Oryza sativa, was domesticated from either of two wild types distributed from India to South East Asia. Previously we had postulated various sites for the origin of rice, as no doubt is mentioned elsewhere in this book, the most common being the southwest Himalayas.2
