Fig. 5
From: Pathways to Asian Civilizations: Tracing the Origins and Spread of Rice and Rice Cultures
Some general hypotheses linking the distribution of subsistence cultures and language affiliation for ca. 4000 BC. The basemap is from Fuller et al. (2011b) and shows in grey a reconstruction of land area under wet rice cultivation as a percentage of modern wet rice land area (the percentage scale is indicated in the shaded bar at the right). It is presumed that wet rice supported denser and expanding human populations. Language family abbreviations: AN Austronesian, Hm-M Hmong-Mien, STAN Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian (of Sagart 2008).