By Kim Ji-myung
In a lecture on Korean history for foreign CEOs in 2011, I showed a photo of a few samples of the earliest cultivated rice grains which were discovered in 1998 at Soro-ri, a small village in central Korea. Common sense had it then, and still in 2019, that rice farming moved from China to Korea and Japan.
At that time, I was unaware that "Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice," a popular archaeology textbook by professor Colin Renfrew and writer Paul Bahn, had already revised the source of rice for mankind from China to Korea since its 2004 edition.
The Soro-ri discovery was first reported by Lee Yung-jo, a professor at Chungbuk National University, and other Korean archaeologists. Radioactive dating of the 59 unearthed burnt grains of rice had pushed back the date for the earliest known cultivation of the plant to somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago.
Lee claimed the discovery challenged the accepted view that the world's oldest rice was found at the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China, dating between 10,500 and 11,000 years ago.
The discovery of Soro-ri rice was first reported at local and international conferences in 1999, 2000 and 2001 and at the Fifth World Archaeology Conference (WAC-5) held in 2003 in Washington, D.C. After WAC-5, the theory was widely covered by SCI/TECH, BBC News and the Discovery Channel.
The excavations were made between 1997 and 1998 and again in 2001. The area was first noticed in 1994 by a team from the Chungbuk National University Museum during a survey of Paleolithic tools buried in the surface soil.
The samples from the Soro-ri site and three peat layers were sampled and analyzed at both Geochron Lab in the U.S. and AMS Lab at Seoul National University immediately after recovery.
Two recent surprises brought my attention back to the ancient rice of Soro-ri.
The first was that it took 15 years to translate and update the Korean version of the Archaeology textbook, covering the fourth (2004) to seventh (2016) editions.
The second was that the Soro-ri ancient rice story has been largely negated by some of the academic community including Koreans. Most notably, it is bluntly denied in a paper by Korean scholar Ahn Sung-mo.
"(The) argument for the earliest evidence of domesticated rice at the Soro-ri site, 15,000 years ago, is invalid," he claims. He thinks rice appears to have been introduced from China's Liaodong region.
Probably because of the continued argument, new radiocarbon measurements for Soro-ri samples were made at the NSF Arizona AMS Laboratory in 2009. Both the ancient rice samples and surrounding peat from the Soro-ri site were dated. The AMS results confirmed that the ages of the rice and peat soil were 12,520±150 and 12,552±90 BP, respectively, according to Lee.
Without much publicity, I found, Lee was honored by the Alumni Association of Yonsei University for his prominent contributions to the world archeology studies by shedding light on the earlier origin of rice.
However, it should be mentioned here that despite all the scholarly communications and media coverage, including the information printed in the textbook, theories and arguments seem to conflict with each other on the origin of rice.
In 2011, a study of the rice genome published in PNAS (Proceedings of National Academy of Science) suggests that the crop was domesticated only once, rather than at multiple times in different places.
The study argues that all known varieties of rice are represented by two distinct sub-species and that rice was first cultivated in China some 9,000 years ago.
Another research work, based on genetic data and a "molecular clock" technique, reports on results matching with existing belief of rice domestication in China's Yangtze Valley about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago and in India's Ganges region about 4,000 years ago.
It is surprising that this continues to be a controversy a full two decades after the discovery of the Soso-ri rice. Do Korean scholars need better and effective strategies in presenting the validity and credibility of their research to global academia?
The writer (heritagekorea21@gmail.com) is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage).
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At that time, I was unaware that "Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice," a popular archaeology textbook by professor Colin Renfrew and writer Paul Bahn, had already revised the source of rice for mankind from China to Korea since its 2004 edition.
The Soro-ri discovery was first reported by Lee Yung-jo, a professor at Chungbuk National University, and other Korean archaeologists. Radioactive dating of the 59 unearthed burnt grains of rice had pushed back the date for the earliest known cultivation of the plant to somewhere between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago.
Lee claimed the discovery challenged the accepted view that the world's oldest rice was found at the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China, dating between 10,500 and 11,000 years ago.
The discovery of Soro-ri rice was first reported at local and international conferences in 1999, 2000 and 2001 and at the Fifth World Archaeology Conference (WAC-5) held in 2003 in Washington, D.C. After WAC-5, the theory was widely covered by SCI/TECH, BBC News and the Discovery Channel.
The excavations were made between 1997 and 1998 and again in 2001. The area was first noticed in 1994 by a team from the Chungbuk National University Museum during a survey of Paleolithic tools buried in the surface soil.
The samples from the Soro-ri site and three peat layers were sampled and analyzed at both Geochron Lab in the U.S. and AMS Lab at Seoul National University immediately after recovery.
Two recent surprises brought my attention back to the ancient rice of Soro-ri.
The first was that it took 15 years to translate and update the Korean version of the Archaeology textbook, covering the fourth (2004) to seventh (2016) editions.
The second was that the Soro-ri ancient rice story has been largely negated by some of the academic community including Koreans. Most notably, it is bluntly denied in a paper by Korean scholar Ahn Sung-mo.
"(The) argument for the earliest evidence of domesticated rice at the Soro-ri site, 15,000 years ago, is invalid," he claims. He thinks rice appears to have been introduced from China's Liaodong region.
Probably because of the continued argument, new radiocarbon measurements for Soro-ri samples were made at the NSF Arizona AMS Laboratory in 2009. Both the ancient rice samples and surrounding peat from the Soro-ri site were dated. The AMS results confirmed that the ages of the rice and peat soil were 12,520±150 and 12,552±90 BP, respectively, according to Lee.
Without much publicity, I found, Lee was honored by the Alumni Association of Yonsei University for his prominent contributions to the world archeology studies by shedding light on the earlier origin of rice.
However, it should be mentioned here that despite all the scholarly communications and media coverage, including the information printed in the textbook, theories and arguments seem to conflict with each other on the origin of rice.
In 2011, a study of the rice genome published in PNAS (Proceedings of National Academy of Science) suggests that the crop was domesticated only once, rather than at multiple times in different places.
The study argues that all known varieties of rice are represented by two distinct sub-species and that rice was first cultivated in China some 9,000 years ago.
Another research work, based on genetic data and a "molecular clock" technique, reports on results matching with existing belief of rice domestication in China's Yangtze Valley about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago and in India's Ganges region about 4,000 years ago.
It is surprising that this continues to be a controversy a full two decades after the discovery of the Soso-ri rice. Do Korean scholars need better and effective strategies in presenting the validity and credibility of their research to global academia?
The writer (heritagekorea21@gmail.com) is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute (K*Heritage).
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