* Astronomy

Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Florida State University have confirmed evidence of domesticated sunflower in Mexico 4,000 years before what had been previously believed.
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Chemical and archaeological evidence has pushed back the earliest known use of cacao, the key ingredient of chocolate, by 500 years.
The chemical compound, theobromine, which only occurs in the cacao plant, has been found on pottery vessels dating back to as early as 1000 BC.
Experts say the vessels were used to serve a fermented cacao drink that was made from the sweet pulp of the plant.
The vessels were unearthed at sites in Puerto Escondido, Honduras.

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Stone Age Chinese people began cultivating rice more than 7,700 years ago by burning trees in coastal marshes and building dams to hold back seawater, converting the marshes to rice paddies that would support growth of the high-yield cereal grain, researchers reported.
New analysis of sediments from the site of Kuahuqiao at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Hangzhou provides the earliest evidence in China of such large-scale environmental manipulation.

"It shows people were changing the environment, actively manipulating the system, and well on their way to having an agricultural way of life" - Gary Crawford, University of Toronto anthropologist, who wasn't involved in the study.

Using data from the site, it is possible to extrapolate a timeline back to the first attempts at domesticating rice, which would have occurred about 10,000 years ago, said archaeologist Li Liu of La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, who was also not involved. That is contemporary with the development of agriculture in the Middle East.
 The finding, being published in the journal Nature, also sheds new light on an ongoing controversy in archaeology: How long did it take for crops to become fully domesticated? The evidence from China, and new finds from elsewhere, indicate that the process took much longer than researchers previously thought.

Nonetheless,  there is now "little doubt that by 7,700 years ago, these people were dedicated rice farmers. ... I think people were getting all the benefits of agriculture before plants were fully domesticated" - archaeobotanist Dolores Piperno of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama

Source: Los Angeles Times

Some 10,000 years ago white rice evolved from wild red rice and began spreading around the globe. But how did this happen?
Researchers at Cornell and elsewhere have determined that 97.9 percent of all white rice is derived from a mutation (a deletion of DNA) in a single gene originating in the Japonica subspecies of rice. Their report, published online in the journal PloS (Public Library of Science) Genetics, suggests that early farmers favoured, bred and spread white rice around the world.

The researchers report that this predominant mutation is also found in the Indica subspecies of white rice. They have found a second independent mutation (a single DNA substitution) in the same gene in several Aus varieties of rice in Bangladesh, accounting for the remaining 2.1 percent of white rice varieties. Neither of these two mutations is found in any wild red rice species.

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