Agrarian society
Agrarian society were preceded by hunter and gatherer and horticultural societies and transition into industrial society. The transition to agriculture, called the Neolithic Revolution, has taken place independently multiple times. Horticulture and agriculture as types of subsistence developed among humans somewhere between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East. The reasons for the development of agriculture are debated but may have included climate change, and the accumulation of food surplus for competitive gift-giving. Most certainly there was a gradual transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural economies after a lengthy period when some crops were deliberately planted and other foods were gathered from the wild. In addition to the emergence of farming in the Fertile Crescent, agriculture appeared in: by at least 6,800 B.C.E. in East Asia (rice) and, later, in Central and South America (maize and squash). Small-scale agriculture also likely arose independently in early Neolithic contexts in India (rice) and Southeast Asia (taro). However, full dependency on domestic crops and animals, when wild resources contributed a nutritionally insignificant component to the diet, did not occur until the Bronze Age.
Rice
Rice was cultivated in South Asia from as early as 5,000 BC. "Several wild cereals, including rice, grew in the Vindhyan Hills, and rice cultivation, at sites such as Chopani-Mando and Mahagara, may have been underway as early as 7,000 BP. Rice appeared in the Belan and Ganges valley regions of northern India as early as 4530 BC and 5440 BC, respectively, The early domestication process of rice in ancient South Asia was based around the wild species "Oryza nivara". This led to the local development of a mix of 'wetland' and 'dryland' agriculture of local "Oryza sativa" var. "indica" rice agriculture, before the truly 'wetland' rice "Oryza sativa" var. "japonica", arrived around 2000 BC.