In this passage, the underlined line really confused me. Upon reading the line, I found it weird that the southern-origin theory proponents contradicted their own position by saying “ early rice-farming societies along the Yangtze were already highly developed…”. It was much later that I realized they were referring to the “sophisticated rice-farming societies” that the author spoke about in the first sentence. Do I have their position right now or is there something I am still missing?
No one contradicts their own theory - so they must be contradicting another theory (yep - the one implied by the first sentence in which rice farming developed not in the south i.e. the Yangtze).
We don’t have to know geography - you just need to infer that Yangtze isn’t southern.
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