Washington, May 30 (IANS): Rice, one of the world's most important staple foods sustaining more than half the global population, was first domesticated in China about 10,000 years ago, a new study has suggested.

"Such an age for the beginnings of rice cultivation and domestication would agree with the parallel beginnings of agriculture in other regions of the world during a period of profound environmental change when the Pleistocene was transitioning into the Holocene," said Lu Houyuan of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the study.

The research, published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was done in collaboration with the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Relics and Archaeology and the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Questions surrounding the origin and domestication of rice have led to a lot of debate in the last decade.