This article reviews the discovery of ancient charred rice remains in southern China and argues that investigating the earliest grains alone does not sufficiently explain why and how people shifted from foraging to agriculture. The author critiques the traditional “discovery model”, which focuses on unearthing the oldest traces of cultivated rice and pinpointing a single center of origin, and instead advocates examing the long-term processes behind domestication through ecological, social, and theoretical perspectives. Recent finds in the lower Yangtze River region suggest that rice was manipulated by prehistoric groups as early as nine to ten millennia ago, yet these foragers still depended primarily on wild resources. Only during the later Liangzhu period, when social complexity intensified elite demands for surplus to mobilize labor, did paddy agriculture become a major subsistence base. After Liangzhu's collapse, agricultural intensification again declined in favor of hunting-gathering. Such evidence, the author contends, is better explained by theories emphasizing "affluent foraging" or competitive feasting rather than population pressure alone. The rise and fall of rice-intensive proctices was less about pure subsistence necessity and more about sociopolitical drivers—particularly elites' pursuit of prestige and surplus. This pattern underscores the need to integrate botanical data, faunal remains, landscape analyses, and social models to clarify the slow, shifting nature of domestication and its link to social organization. Ultimately, understanding paddy agriculture's beginnings requires far more than finding the oldest grains: it demands a nuanced exploration of envrionmental adaptation, ritual consumption, and emerging inequality.