Real History: Rice farming in India much older than thought, used as 'summer crop' by Indus civilisation

Thought to have arrived from China in 2000 BC, latest research shows domesticated rice agriculture in India and Pakistan existed centuries earlier, and suggests systems of seasonal crop variation that would have provided a rich and diverse diet for the Bronze Age residents of the Indus valley.

Rice farming in India much older than thought, used as 'summer crop' by Indus civilisation

Real History: The Lemon was "invented" in Asia

This information has almost no relevance for playing RPGs but just another interesting piece of evidence for South East Asia being very important in early human history.

The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old.

The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar.  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.

From: How The Lemon Was Invented

Reminder that the Chicken, Sugarcane, Bananas, the Coconut as well Ginger were also first domesticated in or around Southeast Asia.

More about early domestication around the world: Geographical Sites and Ecological Components of Agricultural Domestication

No Rice? So what are the food staples?

You never know what kind of topics you'll end up researching when you start world-building. I started wondering if Sundaland had rice paddies and before I knew it I was researching whether cotton grew there. After that my mind returned to whether I should include domesticated animals in my version of the setting.

These questions have far reaching impacts, such as on the size of sustainable city populations and standing armies. Not that I'll be making exact calculations of those but I'd like a rough idea as to whether a city of 10's of thousands of people could even exist and if organised professional armies and centralised states would be possible.

As I was researching these topics I learned that there is a difference between a cultivated food source one that domesticated. Cultivation is the deliberate attempt to sow and manage wild plants. Domestication is when people experiment and consciously select the right seeds to grow for various conditions. You could apply this to animals as well. Creating circumstances to attract certain animals to a place and managing them vs capturing them and selectively breeding them. I've decided that cultivation, besides hunting, foraging and fishing what sustained the Early period which then resulted in domestication and the emergence of the Middle period.

No Rice?

The scientific consensus is that rice was first domesticated in China 8000 to 13,500 years ago: Rice - Asia This lines up roughly with the time period that the floods in Southeast Asia happened. This gives us some wiggle room for our setting. We can imagine rice was domesticated in Sundaland and was then brought to China by the survivors of the great floods.

No Cotton

As an aside the earliest use of cotton is dated to 5000 BCE in the Indus valley: Cotton - History. People in Sundaland will have to make their clothing out of other materials such as animal hides, feathers and bark cloth. I will do more research into this topic in the future.

What are the staples?

I imagine for carbs people would have to rely on wild growing plants. Things like Lotus Rhizome, Sago, Bananas, Yams, Taro. 

As mentioned in other articles the other food sources will be hunting, gathering and fishing. The central savannah and grasslands could provide an interesting setting for the large scale hunting of herbivore while overexploitation of resources around growing cities could provide for interesting plot points in the Classical period. Think of the hypothesis that Mayan societies or those one Easter island collapsed because they overexploited the resources around them.