The Pith: There was one rice domestication event somewhere in central China about 10,000 years ago. Probably!
Going by the numbers rice is the real staff of life. Rice is the staple for ~50% of humans alive today. So the science of rice is of major pragmatic importance of all humans (even if a major disease which impacts rice doesn't result in mass starvation, it will probably generate a price spike for all other staples due to Asian demand). One major issue which I've kept track of over the years has been the origin of rice agriculture: was it a parallel multi-hearth origination or a single-hearth event? We know that there were at least two instantiations of agricultural civilization in the world without any cultural diffusion: in the New World and the Old. More likely there were at least several independent hearths in the old world which utilized local wild ...
