A lot of Africans and non-Africans don’t know plant domestication in Africa began 7,500 years ago; Africa domesticated 2000+ crops that we know of.
During the history of mankind, there was a point when humans began planting and growing their food, even selling it for trade, there was a gradual shift from hunting animals and gathering food sources to farming and animal domestication. Sometimes hunting-gathering-fishing happened alongside farming.
This period is referred to as the Neolithic revolution. With the Neolithic revolution came inevitable changes in the social life of humans. All humans did not simultaneously transition to farming and cultivation of plants at the same time or period; this is as a result of several reasons.
For starters, not every environment favoured farming. The soil quality, types of available plant, amount of rainfall, climate change and soil depletion are all factors that might have affected this.
In Africa, as silly as it may seem, some people are of the opinion that Africans remained hunter-gatherers until around 1500 AD and were ignorant of agriculture until a more “civilized people” taught them how.
This, of course, is false and contrary to glaring evidence available. For example foods like the finger millet, pearl millet, Emmer, yams amongst many others were cultivated between more than 5,500 to 3000 years ago, some even much older. Additional crops have been domesticated from since 5,500-5,000 years ago. Experimentation with domestication began around 12,000 years ago with the Qadan culture people.
Once Africa cracked sorghum, and pearl millet, it cultivated over 2,000 more crops.
Picture: Rice farm
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