Summary
The rice theory holds that the crop a region’s ancestors farmed still shapes how its people think and relate. Paddy rice needs shared irrigation and neighbours who flood and drain their fields together, so rice-growing areas developed more interdependent cultures; wheat can be grown by one family, which favoured independence. Thomas Talhelm and colleagues proposed it in ‘Science’ in 2014.
Their test was within one country: among 1,162 Han Chinese, people from the rice-growing south were more interdependent than those from the wheat-growing north. They conclude that “these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world”. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich praised the data but wanted “much more evidence”.
Rationale
Here what Part 2 calls the ‘Lived’ and ‘Built’ zones do the forming: nobody was told to be interdependent; shared water taught it. Any East–West shorthand claims more than a study within China showed.