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Cattle Before Crops
Cattle Before Crops
Journal of World Prehistory [jowo] PP573-jowo-378641 August 23, 2002 10:22 Style file version June 30th, 2002
In many areas of the world, current theories for agricultural origins empha-
size yield as a major concern during intensification. In Africa, however, the
need for scheduled consumption shaped the development of food production.
African cattle were domesticated during the tenth millennium BP by delayed-
return Saharan hunter-gatherers in unstable, marginal environments where
predictable access to resources was a more significant problem than absolute
abundance. Pastoralism spread patchily across the continent according to re-
gional variations in the relative predictability of herding versus hunting and
gathering. Domestication of African plants was late (after 4000 BP) because
of the high mobility of herders, and risk associated with cultivation in arid
environments. Renewed attention to predictability may contribute to under-
standing the circumstances that led to domestication in other regions of the
world.
KEY WORDS: archaeology; Africa; predictability; cattle domestication.
INTRODUCTION
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0892-7537/02/0600-0099/0
C 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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Sheko and northern Dizi farmers who harvest yams (Dioscorea cayenen-
sis Lam. complex) in wild areas often leave them to regrow, but transplant
them to home gardens in contexts where the need for yams is unusually
great, or yams are more difficult to find. In northeast Sheko, spontaneous
yams are mostly transplanted by bachelors who value them as an easily
prepared food. People with predictable access to food cooked by female
kin transplant spontaneous yams much less frequently. In nearby northern
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The Model
risk and domestication cited earlier, but differs in scale and in emphasis. We
focus on day-to-day, rather than seasonal, uncertainty about the availability
of key resources. We are concerned more with the initial risk and social
cost of not having what you want when you want it, than the subsequent
danger of starvation.
Day-to-day predictability of wild resources may become a major con-
cern in settings where sedentism is increasing, plant abundance is decreas-
ing, or prey mobility is increasing. Increasing sedentism can make distant
resources difficult to collect, so that access becomes unpredictable. Trans-
planting, sowing, or otherwise moving the resource to the locus of human
occupation restores the compromised predictability of that resource. De-
creased abundance of certain plants, or increased mobility of prey can also
bring about a crisis in predictability. In both situations, a formerly depend-
able resource becomes difficult to rely on, and humans may respond by
focusing more on other resources (if available), or by finding ways to better
manage either the resource itself or their access to it. In the case of plants,
this may mean transplanting or sowing the plant in an especially favorable
location where it can be weeded or tended. In the case of animals, it may
mean allocating a certain portion of the human group to follow or guide
stock along optimal routes for grazing, to find water, and to protect the herd
from predators or competing human groups.
These proximate factors (changes in sedentism, plant abundance, or
prey mobility) may be caused by a number of broader social or ecologi-
cal conditions. Sedentism is often thought to arise where key resources are
abundant and concentrated. Decreased or patchy distribution of plants may
be due to natural ecological differences, environmental degradation, over-
exploitation, or novel patterns of predation or disease. Prey mobility can
increase as rainfall becomes lower and more variable, and the distribution
of plants becomes more spatially and temporally stochastic. Any of these
highly varied circumstances may raise search costs for key resources, so that
knowledge about the location or state of a resource becomes less certain.
One potential response to this crisis in predictable access is to manipulate
the distribution of the resource to satisfy human needs for day-to-day or cer-
emonial events. If people knowingly or inadvertently cause morphological
selection in tandem with manipulation of plant or animal distributions, then
domestication may result.
Domestication is linked to broad social or ecological processes, prox-
imate contexts in which predictability becomes crucial, and manipulation
practices meant to restore or enhance predictable access and scheduled con-
sumption. We think the utility of this scheduled consumptionpredictability
model for domestication is broad: it can be applied to plants or animals in
pristine settings of domestication, and to circumstances in which
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domesticates were adopted from elsewhere. In Africa, this model can ex-
plain much about the domestication and spread of cattle, the patchy spread
of food production, and the late domestication of plants.
It is widely recognized that the more arid a region, the greater the vari-
ability in the amount, location, and timing of rainfall, both within seasons
and between years (Coppock, 1993; Nicholson, 1980). Nonequilibrium sys-
tems exist in arid regions of Africa today (less than 300 mm p.a.), where the
coefficient of variation in rainfall often exceeds 30%. Unpredictable rain-
fall causes great variation in the productivity of African savanna ecosystems
(Behnke et al., 1993; Ellis and Swift, 1988). Fluctuations have been especially
marked in North Africa, where regional feedback mechanisms prolong and
amplify climatic perturbations such as droughts (Nicholson, 1989, 1994). The
instability caused by repeated cycles of aridity is likely to have augmented
concerns about predictability among North African hunter-gatherers during
several key periods in prehistory.
Hyperarid conditions prevailed across North Africa during the last
glacial maximum. Very dry conditions c. 20,000 BP began to ameliorate
c. 12,500 BP, giving way to oscillating wet and dry conditions that resulted
from major systemic changes in atmospheric circulation at the end of the
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last glaciation (Grove, 1993; Hassan, 1997, 2000; Nicholson and Flohn, 1980;
Petit-Maire, 1991; Street and Gasse, 1981). The moist climatic regime, punc-
tuated by a cold, dry phase c. 11,35010,250 BP, peaked c. 95008500 BP.
Rainfall decreased gradually across North Africa after c. 8000 BP, with re-
gional variation in timing and severity. Wendorf et al. (2001) recognize six
humid phases in the eastern Sahara between c. 9500 and 3800 BP. During
wetter periods, much of the Sahara was covered with grasslands, the moun-
tain ranges of the Sahara supported mediterranean vegetation, and water
levels were high in lakes and rivers (Fig. 1). The eastern Sahara, however,
was arid at all times, with severe droughts c. 9500 BP and c. 87008600 BP
(Hassan, 2000; Wendorf et al., 1984, 2001). The Saharan region saw many
short arid phases, and two marked ones c. 8000/75007000/6500 BP and 4500
3000 BP (Grove, 1993; Hassan, 1997). More localized droughts occurred c.
95009000 BP at Adrar Bous in northwest Niger, and sporadically between
c. 8500 and 7000 BP in the Chad Basin (Barich, 1998). The effects of these
fluctuations on subsistence would have been especially pronounced in areas
that consistently received scant rainfall, such as the eastern Sahara.
Changes in hunter-gatherer technology and social organization also cre-
ated contexts that favored domestication. During the last glacial maximum,
the Sahara was deserted and population was dense in the Nile Valley. In some
cases, as at Wadi Kubbaniya c. 17,000 BP, settlement remained in one place
for several seasons of the year and resource use was intensive. Plants were
harvested in ways that may have increased their abundance and diversity,
and processed on grindstones. Occupants of such sites also fished, and hunted
wild cattle, hartebeest, and gazelle (Wendorf et al., 1989). But these activi-
ties did not result in domestication. Later, c. 13,00012,500 BP, inhabitants
of the Nile Valley used plants in similar ways at Tushka, where grindstones
are common. At this site, burials with skulls of wild cattle suggest that these
animals had symbolic significance prior to domestication (Wendorf, 1968;
Wendorf and Schild, 1976).
After being deserted during the last glacial maximum, the Sahara was re-
populated c. 9500 BP by hunter-gatherers who used ceramics with distinctive
wavy-line decorative motifs. This cultural complex, scattered across North
Africa, is variously referred to as Khartoum Mesolithic (Arkell, 1949), Epi-
paleolithic (Close, 1995), or Aqualithic (Sutton, 1977). Sites are concentrated
in relatively well-watered massifs and lake basins. Some hunter-gatherers
were fairly sedentary and harvested wild plants intensively, especially cere-
als. At Ti-n-Torha East rockshelter in the Acacus, people built stone struc-
tures (Barich, 1987). At this and nearby sites of Uan Afuda and Uan Tabu,
they gathered and ground wild grasses, and hunted and possibly managed
Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) (Barich, 1987; Cremaschi et al., 1996;
Di Lernia, 1999, 2001; Garcea, 2001). Farther south in the Khartoum Nile,
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August 23, 2002
10:22
Fig. 1. Rainfall and physical features of North Africa. Present-day isohyets are shaded; the 200 mm isohyet is widely recognized as the border between
the Sahara (desert) and Sahel (grassland). Estimated SaharaSahel boundaries for 9000 and 18,000 bp are also shown. Information from Banks (1984),
Gautier (1987a), Goudie (1996), and Petit-Maire (1989). These and all other radiocarbon dates are uncalibrated.
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difficult because the time and place of rainfall and herd movements could
not be foreseen.
Another factor that differentiates the tenth millennium from earlier arid
periods is the presence of ceramic-using, delayed-return hunter-gatherers in
North Africa. Rights to resources and concepts of ownership associated with
such groups are important preconditions for herding (Brooks et al., 1984;
Meillassoux, 1972; North, 1981). Herding presents more scheduling conflicts
for hunter-gatherers than cultivation, because animals, unlike plants, cannot
be left for more than a few hours at a time (Marshall, 2000). Without concepts
of ownership, individuals would have been unlikely to contribute the extra
labor necessary for herding, because any member of the group could have
slaughtered an animal at any time.
Like the perfect storm, the precise conditions that precipitated do-
mestication occurred rarely in North Africa. They converged during the
tenth millennium in areas of the eastern Sahara that were wet enough for wild
cattle but dry enough to be risky, and were populated by hunter-gatherers
with social organization conducive to resource intensification. Archaeolog-
ical, genetic, and climatic evidence together suggest that domestic cattle
spread from a point originperhaps a small playa near the Jebel Marra
massif in northwest Sudan, or east of the Tibesti in northeastern Chad
during the tenthninth millennium BP.
Hunter-gatherers of this region faced a nonequilibrium rainfall system
with generally unpredictable rainfall, as well as short-term climatic fluctua-
tions. We think that these circumstances were challenging, not in terms of
absolute abundance of food, but in terms of the predictability with which
food could be acquired. In this setting, where plant abundance and prey
mobility varied stochastically, the scheduled consumption model predicts
manipulation of favored resources during arid episodes. We suggest that lo-
cal hunter-gatherers intensified their use of wild animal herds rather than
their harvesting of wild plants for several reasons. Plant productivity is es-
pecially vulnerable to variation in rainfall, because the timing of rainfall rel-
ative to plant growth phases is crucial (Le Houerou et al., 1988; Mortimore,
1998). During droughts, ungulates are a more reliable resource than plants
because their populations are maintained through movements that exploit
local differences in topography, vegetation, and rainfall (Behnke et al., 1993).
Following wild ungulates would have been a particularly attractive strategy
for hunter-gatherers of the southeast Sahara during the tenthninth millen-
nia BP, who faced variability in the amount, location, and timing of rainfall.
The alternative, increasing mobility combined with more generalized use of
plants, might not have been possible. Generalization would have carried the
risk of lowered foraging efficiency (Winterhalder, 1986, p. 378), and the plant
component of the diet was already generalized, requiring use of relatively
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than predictability? Precise figures for the number of large animals that
hunter-gatherers would have been able to kill under these circumstances are
difficult to obtain, but a !Kung hunter in a similarly semiarid environment
kills up to five large animals per year (Lee, 1979, p. 231). Hadza hunters
kill substantially more animals: six to nine large animals per hunter per year
(OConnell et al., 1992). In contrast, African pastoralists today harvest only
48% of the cattle herd a year; in areas where drought and disease are com-
mon, this represents the surplus to the growth needs of the herd (Dahl and
Hjort, 1976). To kill as many animals a year as does a single !Kung hunter
would require keeping a herd of at least 125 cattle, an improbable scenario
in the early stages of domestication. Given the slow rate of growth of cattle
herds, and the fact that early domesticates are smaller, not larger, than their
wild ancestors, it is unlikely that cattle were domesticated to increase yield.
We hypothesize that delayed-return Saharan hunter-gatherers of the
tenthninth millennium followed herds, and subsequently domesticated cat-
tle in order to increase day-to-day predictability and reduce risk by manip-
ulating a resource that could move to exploit localized favorable conditions.
Controlling movements diminishes the risk of not finding animals, allows
evaluation of condition and predictable access, and creates a dense, movable
concentration of resources. Day-to-day control of herds and subsequent do-
mestication of cattle also fit with well-known strategies for increasing long-
term predictability: storage, mobility, and sharing (Halstead and OShea,
1989). Keeping cattle is a form of storage on the hoof (Close and Wendorf,
1992; Legge, 1989), and mobility and sharing of resources such as water
and grazing are probable features of early pastoralism in the Sahara. [Our
use of the term pastoralism follows Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudsons
(1980) definition of pastoralists as people who rely heavily on production
from domestic herds, and move herds to pasture.] Nascent cooperative social
and political links among far-flung early herding groups would have passed
on information and established safety networks (Legge, 1989; Robinson,
1989; Ryan et al., 2000). These could have developed through resource shar-
ing, stock loans, ceremonies, and other social bonds. Cattle domestication in
North Africa established mobile herding, and pastoralism rather than settled
agriculture, as the earliest form of food production. In the following sections,
we discuss the wide-ranging influence of herding on the subsequent spread
and development of food producing economies in Africa.
after initial contact or colonization by food producers. This was due to differ-
ent factors in different regions within Africa, most of which related ultimately
to the relative predictability of herding versus hunting and gathering. There
was variation in the timing as well as the spread of early food production
in Africa. Herding spread rapidly but incompletely across the Sahara dur-
ing the mid-Holocene. As climatic conditions deteriorated during the sixth
millenium BP, pastoralists moved south to better-watered regions, such as
the Sudanese Nile. Small groups of pastoralists moved into eastern Africa
slightly later. In southern Africa, early food production is largely associated
with movements of Iron Age mixed farmers into the region c. 2000 years
ago. In this section, we focus only on regions that are central to understand-
ing continent-wide variability in pathways to food production. Parts of the
western Sahara and the African rainforests that are important to the domes-
tication of plantsand where livestock adoption follows patterns similar to
those in other regionsare discussed in a subsequent section on African
plant domestication.
Sahara as it became drier (Haaland, 1992; Hassan, 1997). Cattle, sheep, and
goats appear by the sixth millennium BP (Gautier, 1984b,c; Peters, 1986)
(Fig. 2). Local assemblages of lithics and ceramics show continuity (Caneva,
1987, 1989; Haaland, 1995; Marks and Mohammed-Ali, 1991), indicating
that any movement of Saharans into the region was small-scale, and culture
contact was more important than migration to socioeconomic change.
Entry of Saharans may have been eased by prior social links with the
Sudan, indicated by trade and common ceramic styles. Compared to the
original Saharan herding environments, the Sudanese Nile offered more de-
pendable, productive resources. This area also posed no particular problems
for cattle, as it lies within their wild range. Like earlier local hunter-gatherers,
pastoralists used large, semipermanent camps near the Nile, as at Esh
Shaheinab and Geili (Caneva, 1988; Haaland, 1995; Krzyzaniak, 1991). Do-
mestic animals are the dominant large mammals at many sites, such as
Kadero c. 50004000 BP, but were added to a wide range of wild animals
used by earlier hunter-gatherers (Gautier, 1984c; Haaland, 1992). Unlike
Saharan pastoralists, herders in this better-watered landscape are thought to
have used plants more intensively than their hunter-gatherer predecessors.
Site structure and increased use of grindstones at Kadero 1, Um Direiwa, and
Zakiab indicate to Haaland (1981, 1992) that, as early as 5000 BP, pastoral
groups were cultivating sorghum that was morphologically wild (Stemler,
1990).
Social differentiation appeared among Sudanese herders by the sixth
millennium BP. Clusters of especially rich graves of men, women, and chil-
dren at Kadero 1 argue for differences in wealth (Krzyzaniak, 1991), but
there is no evidence for social stratification. Pastoral intensification and a
decrease in wild animal use is also evident at some sites in the Middle Nile
after 5300 BP. Despite these developments, the spread of herding was patchy:
at Shaqadud, east of the Nile, subsistence focused on wild resources as late
as 4000 BP (Marks and Mohammed-Ali, 1991; Peters, 1991). Farther to the
east near the Eritrean border, cattle and small stock appear at Atbai sites
during the fifth and fourth millennium BP (Fattovich, 1993; Sadr, 1991, pp.
53, 138).
As herders continued to spread east and south of the central Nile, they
moved beyond the natural distribution of wild cattle in North Africa and
encountered new environmental and epizootic challenges. The earliest do-
mestic cattle in the Horn of Africa date to c. 35002500 BP at Lake Besaka
and Gobedra (Brandt, 1984; Phillipson, 1977). They spread slowly because
of the vertical relief and closed woodlands of highland areas. Dramatic rock
paintings of cattle herds in the Horn probably date to this period, and may re-
flect ceremonies and seasonal gatherings of frontier pastoral groups (Brandt
and Carder, 1987; Joussaume, 1981).
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Before 4000 BP, small numbers of herders migrated into Kenya from
increasingly arid areas of Sudan and Ethiopia (Fig. 2), but herding was
not widespread until c. 3000 BP, and extended only to northern Tanzania.
Arid conditions c. 60003300 BP (Ambrose, 1998) and wild animal diseases
(Gifford-Gonzalez, 2000) may have slowed the spread of herding in south-
ern Kenya, and made cattle a less predictable source of food than in more
northern areas. Cattle moving into areas with wildebeest and buffalo were
exposed for the first time to Bovine Malignant Catarrhal and East Coast
Fevers. In this frontier context, the low density of herders would have made
seasonal aggregations more important, because it would have constrained
other mechanisms for risk reduction, such as intergroup exchange networks,
stock loans, and gifts (Gifford-Gonzalez, 1998, 2000), as well as the avail-
ability of breeding stock.
Hunter-gatherers of the fifth millenium BP near Lake Turkana and in
central Kenya are thought to have added herding to local hunting or fishing
strategies, because lithics show continuity with earlier East African tradi-
tions (Ambrose, 1984a; Bartheleme, 1985). Use of the Pastoral Neolithic
funerary complex at the northern Kenyan site of Jarigole (Nelson, personal
communication, 1998; Gifford-Gonzalez, 2000) may have reinforced exten-
sive social networks among dispersed early pastoral groups. Farther south
in the central Rift Valley, the earliest domestic stock are found at very low
densities in a hunter-gatherer occupation, RBL2.1, c. 4000 BP at Enkapune
Ya Muto rockshelter (Marean, 1992).
A mosaic of pastoral and hunter-gatherer groups coexisted in south-
ern Kenya and parts of northern Tanzania from >4000 BP onwards. After
3500 BP, two distinct specialized pastoral cultures emerged: the Elmenteitan
at sites like Ngamuriak, and the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic at Narosera and
Crescent Island Main (Bower, 1991; Robertshaw, 1990). Both cultures relied
on intensive use of livestock, and made little use of abundant wild ungu-
lates (Gifford-Gonzalez, 2000; Marshall, 2000). At the site of Enkapune Ya
Muto, contemporary Eburran 5 hunter-gatherers had lithic technology and
microlith styles similar to those of earlier hunter-gatherers, and consumed
large quantities of wild fauna and limited stock (Ambrose, 1984b). The few
domestic animals are attributed to gifts from pastoral neighbors, raiding, or
limited herding (Marean, 1992). Nderit ceramics similar to those found on
pastoral sites also attest to interaction between Eburran hunter-gatherers
and nearby herders (Ambrose, 1998).
Pastoral use of the landscape was mobile and extensive, did not destroy
hunter-gatherer habitat, and allowed local hunter-gatherer subsistence and
social organization to continue (Gifford-Gonzalez, 2000; Marshall, 1986,
pp. 248249). Gifford-Gonzalez (1998) argues that a likely pastoral strategy
for reducing the risk of moving into new areas would have been to integrate
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Southern Africa
farming was confined to the eastern half of South Africa. Away from the con-
tinental margins, immediate-return hunter-gatherers continued to exploit
flexible and predictable resources such as tubers and mongongo nuts, which
were more evenly distributed in space and time than were cereals in North
Africa. In areas where hunter-gatherers and food producers coexisted, they
had variable relations, ranging from trade (Bousman, 1998; Kinahan, 1996;
Smith et al., 1991, 1996; Wadley, 1996) to clientship (Denbow and Wilmsen,
1986; Schrire, 1992). Over much of southernmost Africa, agriculture was not
adopted until recent times (Deacon, 1984a,b; Smith, 1992a).
Pathways to food production in northern and southern Africa offer
an interesting contrast. Diamond (1997, p. 132) suggests that southern re-
gions lacked a critical mass of potential domesticates, and that domestic
plants spread south slowly because of Africas northsouth axis. Although
the ranges of wild sorghum and rice extend into southern Africa (Harlan,
1992a), Diamond notes that cattle and most African cereal crops are not
found wild south of the equator. Factors affecting continental patterns of
rainfall also differ between Sahel and southern Africa in ways that may have
affected pathways to food production. Despite significant arid areas within
southern Africa, the subcontinent as a whole is generally cooler and wetter,
and lacks the local feedback mechanisms that prolong droughts in the Sahel
(Nicholson, 1989, 1994). Increasingly unpredictable rainfall and the resul-
tant stresses on Saharan hunter-gatherer groups during the Holocene may
not have had parallels in the Southern Hemisphere.
Another interesting contrast with northern Africa is that southern re-
gions have no evidence for early ceramic use, and little for delayed-return
subsistence strategies (but see Sadr, 1998). Digging sticks and digging stick
weights for harvesting underground storage organs are found in the ar-
chaeological record from early periods (Deacon 1984a,b). Holocene hunter-
gatherers in southern Africa were able to exploit high-ranked tubers and
nuts, resources that are consumed immediately. Thus, factors that promote
use and storage of relatively low-ranked resources such as wild grasses may
not have operated in southern Africa. Finally, the southward spread of a fully
developed Early Iron Age agricultural complex made the domestication of
local plants less likely than in other parts of Africa, where early herders
without domestic plants were the first food producers in many regions.
Why So Patchy?
124
Table I. (Continued )
Vernacular Latin Edible parts Habitat and/or
Journal of World Prehistory [jowo]
Fig. 3. Proposed areas of domestication of African plants (after Harlan, 1971). 1. Guinea millet;
2. Fiono and black fonio; 3. African rice; 4. Yam (Dioscorea cayenensis complex); 5. Enset; 6.
Tef; 7. Groundnuts (Kerstingiella and Vooandzeia); 8. Sorghum; 9. Bullrush/pearl millet; 10.
Finger millet.
millet appears abruptly 600 years after early pastoralists enter Burkina Faso
and Nigeria (Neumann, 1999).
In the middle Niger region of Mali, domestic pearl millet, sorghum,
and African rice are known from the beginning of the occupation sequence
at Jenne Jenno c. 2060 BP. Even after farming becomes widespread, wild
plants remain important: use of wild panicoid grasses persists in the Chad
basin (Neumann, 1999), and wild rice, Brachiaria, Panicum, Echinocloa, and
greens are found at Jenne Jenno (McIntosh, 1995, 1997).
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Sites in the eastern Sahara and Sudanese Nile reveal evidence for early
intensive use of sorghum, but for late morphological change. Sorghum dating
to c. 79508020 BP at Nabta has lipids that differ from the wild form, but it is
morphologically wild (Wasylikowa and Dahlberg, 1999; Wasylikowa, 2001;
Wendorf et al., 1998). Its abundance indicates intensive use (Close, 2001) or
perhaps occasional cultivation of wild sorghum (Wasylikowa et al., 1997).
Impressions of wild sorghum appear in sherds at Um Direiwa, Kadero 1,
and Zakiab (Stemler, 1990). On the basis of these, and on the high fre-
quency of grindstones (e.g., 30,000 at Um Direiwa), Abdel-Magid (1989)
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and Haaland (1981, 1992, 1999) argue that wild sorghum was cultivated by c.
5000 BP. Secure dates for domestic sorghum are late: c. 2060 BP at Jenne Jenno
(McIntosh, 1995) and 20250 AD at the historic sites of Meroe, Jebel Tomat,
and Qasr Ibrim in the Sudan (Clark and Stemler, 1975; Rowley-Conwy et al.,
1999; Stemler and Falk, 1981) (Fig. 4). Morphologically domestic sorghum
(race bicolor) from Qasr Ibrim is genetically identical to both wild and do-
mestic modern sorghum in the area of the genome studied, supporting the
idea of recent domestication (Rowley-Conwy et al., 1999).
Despite the importance of the Horn of Africa as a center for agricultural
origins, little is known about domestication processes there. Recent excava-
tions in the Aksum area (Fig. 4) have found domestic tef in historic periods:
c. 500 BC at sites D and K (Boardman, 1999) and during the fifth century
AD at Bieta Giyorgis (Bard et al., 1997). Sorghum and noog oilseeds appear
during the sixth century AD (Boardman, 1999). Ethnoarchaeological studies
of crop processing stages for tef (DAndrea et al., 1999) and of differences
between wild and domestic enset (Hildebrand, 2001) will facilitate future ar-
chaeological investigation. The relative antiquity of indigenous versus exotic
Near Eastern crops in Ethiopia has yet to be fully explored.
East Africa has long been regarded as the locus for domestication of
finger millet (Harlan, 1992a). Little research has been conducted on Later
Stone Age sites in Uganda, but domestic finger millet occurs by the early
seventh century AD at Aksum (Boardman, 1999), and c. 1185 BP at Deloraine
Farm in Kenya (Ambrose, 1984c) (Fig. 4).
The forests and forest margins of central and western Africa have
yielded little archaeological data on the domestication of plants. After do-
mestic sheep and goat appeared c. 3500 BP at Kintampo, use of local legumes
and oil palm may have increased (but see Maley, 2001), yet local wild re-
sources such as Canarium and small wild animals remained important
(Anquandah, 1993; Flight, 1976; Stahl, 1985, 1993). Domestic cowpeas and
Bambara groundnuts are first found in Iron Age contexts in western Africa
(Vogelsang et al., 1999).
No indigenous domesticates are known from the southern half of the
continent. Rather, pearl and finger millet, sorghum, and domestic pulses ap-
pear in conjunction with Early Iron Age mixed farming in Zambia,
Zimbabwe, and South Africa (Maggs, 1984). The earliest grain, domestic
Pennisetum, dates to c. 270 AD at Silver Leaves (Klapwijk, 1974; Klapwijk
and Huffman, 1996) (Fig. 4).
Why So Late?
variable rates of outcrossing, and pearl millet outcrosses the most but ap-
pears to have been domesticated the earliest. Although genetic isolation is
a well-known general requirement of domestication, the actual mechanisms
for isolation during prehistoric times are far from clear.
Climate and ecology in the southern Sahara may have fostered inter-
actions between people and plants that would not have led to domesti-
cation. As already noted, low and variable rainfall affects productivity of
plants more than that of animals, because the timing of rainfall relative to
plant growth phases is crucial, and plants have fixed positions, whereas an-
imals can move or disperse. All of these factors make cultivation of grains
in marginal environments more risky than plant collecting. Even today,
much of the northern Sahel can support pastoralism but not farming. Ar-
eas with less than 558 mm p. a. average one crop failure in 10 years, and
farming is rarely attempted with less than 348 mm p. a. (Mortimore, 1998,
p. 77).
If hunter-gatherers or pastoralists with marginal subsistence due to low
and variable rainfall sought more predictable access to food, then empha-
sizing livestock would have been more logical than undertaking cultivation.
Planting would have entailed gambling on when and where rain would fall
and which cereals the rainfall distribution would suit. Different grains have
different growth cycles: pearl millet matures quickly, whereas sorghum grows
slowly but can use residual moisture (Mortimore, 1998, p. 89). By focusing on
stock, herders could move animals to pasture and continue exploiting wild
grass stands wherever they occurred in any given year. From initial stages
of cattle domestication until the fourth millenium BP, pastoral strategies
provided more predictable access to food than did intensification of plants.
Mobile pastoral strategies precluded steady selection on populations of use-
ful plants. When pastoralists moved into wetter grasslands and became more
sedentary, then selection pressures on plants became sufficiently constant to
cause morphological change.
Domestication requires a constellation of cultural plant management
practices, such as reaping with a sickle and replanting harvested grain that is
either self-fertilizing or genetically isolated year after year. If not all of the
requisite practices or conditions are in place, then selection is not maintained,
and morphological change does not take place. In Africa, suitable sets of
factors for domestication came together late, rarely, and in highly varied
circumstances. This is largely because the unpredictable environments of
the early middle Holocene Sahara, and the mobile pastoral lifestyles they
fostered, together created circumstances in which humans would not have
exercised continuous, directional selection on cereals. Continuing intensive
use of wild plants indigenous to different parts of Africa led to the continents
noncentric pattern of domestication.
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Journal of World Prehistory [jowo] PP573-jowo-378641 August 23, 2002 10:22 Style file version June 30th, 2002
DISCUSSION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper could not have been written without years of fieldwork by
many Africanist scholars. We dedicate it to the memory of J. Desmond Clark.
We are grateful to David Browman, Cathy DAndrea, Gayle Fritz, Randi
Haaland, Mary McDonald, Tom Pilgram, Patty Jo Watson, and Fred Wendorf
for comments and information. We thank Angela Close and five anonymous
reviewers, but are solely responsible for any errors. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez,
Ruth Shahack-Gross, and Darla Dale contributed stimulating discussions of
African archaeology. We are indebted to the institutions in Ethiopia and
Kenya that have supported our research: the Kenya National Museums and
the ARCCH and National Herbarium in Ethiopia.
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