France, Oct. 3 -- Put the two plants side by side and the untrained eye would struggle to tell them apart.

"They're going to look very similar to each other, but they evolved differently," Michael Purugganan, a New York University evolutionary biologist who has spent years studying the domestication of rice, told RFI.

Asian rice, Oryza sativa, was domesticated along China's Yangtze River around 9,000 years ago - thousands of years before West African farmers domesticated Oryza glaberrima, Purugganan said.

Yet far less is known about how that second domestication happened.

"We don't know as much as we do about Asian rice, largely because the archaeology in that part of the world is not as well developed as in Asia," Purugganan explaine...