In all seriousness, the rice we have today is "large rice." It's certainly been selectively bred over thousands of years to produce the largest grains.
From all the time savings not having to figure out how to eat the last of the rice on your plate, and not having to clean rice grains out of fork tines.
Unfortunately, our ancestors hunted giant rice to extinction. I understand scientists are attempting to de-extinct them by splicing the missing genes with coconuts, their closest living relative. This is why you find so much coconut rice out there these days.
Are you sure it’s not because oxygen levels used to be higher in prehistoric atmosphere and because of that larger forms of life were able to sustain themselves through respiration? Oxygen levels dropped, giant rice went extinct?
You’re both conflating two different things. First, a meteor wiped out the giant rice letting the smaller and meeker rice inherit the Earth. Second, Oxygen levels were always at 20%, but back then there was a lot more of it.
Woah I had no idea…I always just assumed that the size of the grains decreased proportionally with the retreat of the polar rice caps at the end of the last rice age.
Indeed, but a larger factor was the plate tectonics which over the millennia become smaller and more fragmented, resulting in smaller plates and reduced food portion sizes.
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