Around 7000 BCE, rice and soybeans began to be cultivated in China. In Mexico, maize was planted and domesticated from teosinte, its ancestor, and its cultivation spread throughout the rest of the Americas.
In the Andes, potatoes were planted around 6000 BCE and domesticated in the mountains between Peru and Bolivia. The common bean was domesticated in Mexico and South America. At the same time, in the eastern Mediterranean (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel), people began using olive oil, while in North America, Indigenous peoples domesticated sunflowers.
Rice spread to Thailand, India, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Around 4500 BCE, sugarcane was domesticated on the island of New Guinea, and its use spread to Asia; around 4000 BCE, soybean cultivation spread through Southeast Asian countries such as Japan and Korea.
Thus, all these crops began to spread and travel around the world at different times, eventually covering a wider territory and being cultivated in places where they are not native but can grow.
