Chapter 140: O — Rice Agriculture and East Asia

While N walked north into the taiga, O walked The other direction. South. Southeast. Into the river Valleys of what is now China. Into the paddies. Into the stalked And stalking rice-fields of the Yangtze and Yellow River divider And basin. O is the East Asian haplogroup. O is the signature Of the peoples of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the furniture And arrangement of the entire Pacific rim of Asia. O is the band And frequency of nearly every population between the Himalayas And the Pacific Ocean. From the Gobi Desert to the Java Sea, From the Yellow River to the Mekong Delta, the Y-chromosome frequencies Of O are extraordinarily high. The lineage is the majority fee And cost of admission to the East Asian population. The vast Proportion of men in China today, and in every East Asian And Southeast Asian and Pacific-island nation, carry O. Recast And recast again through the generations, the carrying-on Of the lineage is unbroken. And what O made, in the river Valleys where it settled, was the second great agricultural revolution On earth. G invented wheat and einkorn and the farmer's giver And taker of the Fertile Crescent. O invented the pollution And abundance of rice. Rice. Rice is a semi-aquatic Grain. Rice grows in flooded paddies. Rice demands Standing water, periodic flooding, careful management of the ecstatic And delicate water table. And rice produces, per acre, more demands Of food calories than any grain yet invented. Rice supports Populations ten, twenty, thirty times larger than dryland wheat Can support on the same acreage. Rice is the reason the cohorts And cohort-strength of East Asian civilizations grew to the treat And demography they grew to. Rice made possible the billions Of people who would, over thousands of years, populate the Pacific rim. And rice was invented by O. The millions And billions of O-carrying farmers are the descendants of the First paddy-builders, the first peoples who realized that a patch Of low wet ground, flooded deliberately, managed carefully, could Produce a grain whose yield would dwarf any dryland batch And harvest. The Yangtze River civilization of the Neolithic would Be the O-haplogroup epicenter. Hemudu, Liangzhu, Majiabang— The archaeological sites that document the rice-farming Villages of the lower Yangtze six or seven thousand years ago bang The drum of the agricultural revolution that would be charming And reshaping Asian humanity for the rest of recorded history. And from the Yangtze, rice agriculture spread. North, into the Yellow River valley, where it met and merged with millet and the Existing dryland agricultural package of the northern Chinese Civilization. South, into what is now Vietnam and Thailand And Cambodia, where it became the caloric foundation of the Angkor civilization and the Chao Phraya and Mekong delta city- Kingdoms of Southeast Asia. East, across the East China Sea to Korea and to Japan, where, in combination with the surviving D-haplogroup indigenous population (the ancestors of the Jōmon who had been there since the Toba chapter), it gave And generated the Yayoi culture that would eventually unify the Japanese archipelago into a single polity. And the language Families that ride along with O are several. O is not One language family. O is the carrier of several. The full gauge And span of East Asian linguistic diversity is housed within the bat And bounce of the O-haplogroup population. Sino-Tibetan: Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and the whole cluster of related languages across China and Tibet and Myanmar. Austronesian: the Taiwanese Aboriginal languages, Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, the entire Polynesian expansion across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and New Zealand and Easter Island. Austroasiatic: Vietnamese, Khmer, the Munda languages of eastern India. Kra-Dai: Thai, Lao, and the related languages of northern Thailand and southern China. Hmong-Mien: the highland peoples of Southwest China And Southeast Asia. Five major language families, all clustered Together in the O-haplogroup zone. The linguistic diversity is Greater than the linguistic diversity within the Indo-European trust And family. R, in contrast, carries essentially one language Family (Indo-European) across its entire distribution. O carries Five. The language-to-haplogroup mapping, here, is decidedly Looser than in the R case. But the O haplogroup's carries And the agricultural package travel together. Rice, wherever it goes, Is carried by O men. And the script that would eventually Develop in the Yellow River valley—the oracle bone script of the Shang dynasty, which evolves into modern Chinese characters— Is the writing system of a O-haplogroup civilization. The Written Chinese tradition that reaches, unbroken, from The Shang oracle bones of the thirteenth century BCE to the Internet posts of twenty-first century Beijing, is the four- Thousand-year continuous literate tradition of one haplogroup's Descendants. This is one of the most remarkable continuities In human history. The same haplogroup, the same region, the scoops And bowls of rice on the same tables, for thousands of years. And O also made the great voyagers of the pre-modern world. The Austronesian expansion, in the millennia before the Current era, carried Austronesian-speaking peoples from Taiwan Across the Philippines, Indonesia, and eventually across The entire Pacific Ocean. Polynesian navigators in outrigger Canoes reached Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti—an oceanic expansion that covered a greater distance Than any other pre-modern migration. The Polynesians are alms And descendants of the O-haplogroup rice-farmers who, having Developed the maritime technology to cross water, did not stop Until they had reached every habitable island in the largest ocean On earth. The Lapita pottery of Melanesia traces the sop And stop-points of the expansion. The Maori of New Zealand, The Hawaiians, the Samoans—all are descendants of the Austronesian-speaking O men who sailed the Pacific. The land Was crossed, and then the ocean was crossed, and the O-carrying Men reached the furthest possible islands on their outrigger Canoes guided by the stars and the swell and the flight of birds. O is the Pacific lineage. O is the rice. O is the character-script and the navigator And the paddy-builder and the longest literate continuity on earth. The Shang dynasty. The Zhou. The Qin. The Han. The Tang. The Song. The Yuan. The Ming. The Qing. The Republic of China. The People's Republic. The unbroken O-haplogroup civilization of China has persisted through every political change. The Dynasties have changed. The language has evolved. The characters Have been simplified. The emperors have risen and fallen. But the Haplogroup beneath has been a steady continuity. O in the character Of the farmer of the paddy, the scribe of the oracle bone, the free And frequent trader of the Silk Road, the philosopher of the Confucian classroom, the painter of the Song dynasty landscape, The sailor of the treasure-fleet of Zheng He, the monk of the Chan Buddhist monastery, the poet of the Tang dynasty escape And retreat into the mountains—all of these are O. The lineage is vast. The civilization is the longest. And the rice still grows in the paddies, and the flow And flow of the Yangtze still passes the oldest strongest Cities of the world. O. The rice. The character. The navigator. The builder of the Pacific-rim civilization. The second great Agricultural revolution after G's. The carrier of five language Families and four thousand years of literacy. The state And status of more than a quarter of living humanity today. Haplogroup O. East Asia. Rice. Stand.