For ancient East Asia, there were three most important crops. The earliest domesticated crop in northern China is millet, which is what modern China people call millet. What kind of weed is Xiaomi's ancestor? At present, there is no conclusion. Weeds like millet are widely distributed in Eurasia.

From 9000 to 7000 years ago, it was located on both sides of the middle reaches of the Yellow River. Today, the ancestors of China people in Henan and Hebei began to cultivate millet artificially. This is the first time that agriculture appeared in northern China. Relying on the stable food source provided by planting millet, these people became the first people in the north to change from a hunter-gatherer society to a settled agricultural society.

In the following hundreds of years, the scope of planting millet gradually expanded, spreading eastward and downstream along the Yellow River. Today, in Shandong, I went up the river to the west, entered the Guanzhong Basin along the Yellow River and Weihe River, and reached the southeast of Gansu.

As a modern crop, millet has serious shortcomings, not only low yield, but also difficult to increase production even under good water and fertilizer conditions. However, in arid and barren soil, millet can still maintain a relatively stable yield. Millet with short growth period is almost the most water-saving grain with strong disease resistance. Domesticating millet is of great significance to the northern ancestors who just started agricultural technology.

2. Millet

The existence of another crop, millet, has been mentioned in "Separation of Millet". In ancient China, it was as important as millet. ?

The domestication of millet is a little later than that of millet. When agriculture just started, North China was experiencing a period of dry and cold climate. Although millet and millet are both dry land crops, the drought resistance of millet is different from that of millet with poor soil tolerance.

Millet grows best when the annual average temperature is 6- 10℃ and the precipitation is 350-450 mm, while Su prefers the environment where the annual average temperature is 8- 10℃ and the precipitation is 450-550 mm. As the climate gradually turns to warm and humid, millet begins to spread westward from warmer and humid places in the east of North China Plain.

Once it becomes feasible to plant millet, it becomes very important that its yield is slightly higher than that of millet. Higher output means feeding more people, supporting larger settlements and more complex social forms. Long-term cultivation of millet and millet agriculture has finally made Chinese ancestors stand out among many ethnic groups in East Asia and enter the era of civilization.

China people have a full understanding of the importance of millet. Millet was also called millet in the pre-Qin period. Zhou people thought their ancestors were Hou Ji. The "Hou" here is the name of the ancient leader of China. Tracing back to Hou Ji, it fully shows that Zhou people attached importance to millet. Later, "millet" is an important part of the national pronoun "Guo", and millet is the foundation of the country.

3. Rice

At the same time, in the south of China, a group of people, supported by another crop, quickly marched into civilization. This crop is also the only one of the three main gramineous crops that originated in East Asia, and it still maintains the position of the main source of population food in China.

Thirty percent of the cultivated land in China is used to grow rice, and the staple food of more than half of the population in China is rice. Needless to say, the northeast and south mainly eat rice. Even in the north of China, historically, rice transported from the south to the north has been heavily dependent on solving the food problem. It is no exaggeration to say that rice is the first food crop in China. The domestication of rice originated in China.

At present, wild rice grows in Fujian, Hunan, Jiangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan in southern China, especially in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan. There are three theories about where wild rice is domesticated as cultivated rice, one is the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the other is South China, and the other is Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. Plant fossils of cultivated rice have been found in these three areas, and wild rice has been distributed in ancient times.

Judging from the richness of fossil evidence of cultivated rice, it seems that the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River were the first areas to domesticate rice. However, the genetic study of cultivated rice shows that the organelle haplotype of cultivated rice in China is the closest to that of wild rice in South China, and the most likely domestication place is in the lower reaches of the Pearl River.

Like wild millet, the seeds of wild rice will fall off automatically when they mature. Since 10,000 BC, ancestors in southern China began to collect wild rice seeds as food. This plant with great potential soon showed its value, and residents in southern China soon began to try to grow rice artificially.

The characteristics that wild rice is not easy to collect and eat are gradually improved during domestication. When the wild rice is immature, the open panicle becomes closed, the awn becomes shorter and disappears, and the grain color turns from dark to white. After these changes, cultivated rice has become an irreplaceable main food crop in southern China.

4. Wheat

During the Spring and Autumn Period, wheat was widely planted in northern China. Zuo Zhuan once told a story. A wizard predicted that Jin Jinggong would not eat new wheat in the coming year, so in the next year's wheat harvest season, Jin Jinggong called the wizard and said that he would eat wheat soon. The wizard misled people and put him to death.

However, just as he was about to eat new wheat, he suddenly felt abdominal pain. When he went to the toilet, he unfortunately fell into the toilet and died. After all, he failed to eat wheat. There is no doubt that the introduction of wheat has had a far-reaching impact on China. However, the population advantage of China people was laid long before the introduction of wheat. Xiaomi and Xiaomi have made great contributions to this, and wheat can only be regarded as icing on the cake at best.

5. Soybeans

In prehistoric times, soybeans were mainly planted in the northeast of China. With the continuous cultivation and cultivation of human beings, there are more and more oily components in soybeans. In the Warring States period, soybeans, which were called "glutinous rice" by the ancients, began to replace millet, and were called as important crops alongside millet.

In the works of a hundred schools of thought contend, whenever agriculture is mentioned, the existence of millet is almost always mentioned. "Mozi" mentioned: plow crops, trees harvest millet. Xunzi mentioned that industry and commerce picked millet instead of plowing. In the Warring States period, millet was synonymous with grain.