THE AFRICAN ORIGIN OF PASTROLISM

Archaeologists have long believed that food production developed worldwide much the way it did in the Near East: as climate changes made wild grains less available, hunters and gatherers settled in villages and relatively quickly domesticated plants and then, over the next few thousand years, animals (Grigson, 1991, p. 119). However, recent genetic studies and excavations in Africa suggest that the patterns of domestication there were strikingly different (Abdulhamid, 2015, p. 27). This new research, emerging in the last few years in academic books and articles, shows that in Africa, wild cattle were domesticated several thousand years before plants, and that farming and herding spread patchily and slowly across the continent (Di Lernia et al., 2013, p. 2).

While the first undisputed remains of domesticated cattle appear in the African archaeological record about 5900 B.C. at a site in Chad, other studies suggest that cattle were domesticated in the same region as early as 9,000 years ago (Grigson, 1991, p. 139). A study of African cattle published in the journal Science in 2002 suggested that cattle were domesticated independently in Africa, rather than being imported from the Near East, as they were across most of Europe and Asia (Hanotte et al., 2002, p. 336).

The first pastoralists in Africa, who traveled with domesticated cattle, had probably captured wild animals at first to provide insurance as the Sahara, then partly covered in grassland, began to dry (Abdulhamid, 2015, p. 46). They moved south to savannas to find moister conditions (Di Lernia et al., 2013, p. 5). These cattle-assisted hunter-gatherers took milk, blood, and meat from their animals (Grigson, 1991, p. 140). Some pastoralists began to worship cattle, burying them in elaborate graves (Abdulhamid, 2015, p. 49).

At sites across the Sahara, cattle images appear in rock art (Di Lernia et al., 2013, p. 8). Pastoralism gradually spread west across the southern Sahara, and then south, reaching the equator around 2000 B.C. and South Africa by the first centuries A.D. (Grigson, 1991, p. 141). Like the hunter-gatherers with whom they shared their environment, pastoralists made great use of the abundant wild African grasses growing in the savanna, but did not plant them (Abdulhamid, 2015, p. 50). Both groups also made ceramics, an innovation that in the Near East came only with settled agricultural villages (Di Lernia et al., 2013, p. 10).

References

Grigson, C. (1991). An African origin for African cattle? — some archaeological evidence. The African Archaeological Review, 9, 119-139.

Abdulhamid, L. A. (2015). Artistic styles in the engravings of the ancient rock art in Wadi al Baqar (Valley of Cows) in the Sahara Desert in Libya. University of Newcastle.

Di Lernia, S., et al. (2013). Inside the "African Cattle Complex": Animal Burials in the Holocene Central Sahara. PLOS ONE, 8(2), e56879.

Hanotte, O., et al. (2002). African pastoralism: Genetic imprints of origins and migrations. Science, 296(5566), 336-339.

Marshall, F. (2000). The origins of African pastoralism. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 19(2), 163-187.

Smith, A. B. (2005). African herders: Emergence of pastoral traditions. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

#Africa #BlackHistory #World