Domestication of the Water Buffalo

The water buffalo was domesticated in South and Southeast Asia several thousand years ago in what genetic evidence indicates were at least two largely separate processes: the river buffalo, domesticated on the Indian subcontinent and used mainly for milk, and the swamp buffalo, domesticated further east across Southeast Asia and southern China and used primarily as a draft animal for wet-rice cultivation. Uniquely suited to the flooded conditions of paddy agriculture, the swamp buffalo in particular became the principal plough animal of rice farming across much of monsoon Asia, a role it continues to fill on smallholder farms throughout the region.