From 10th century BCE
Sahara and western Sudan
Early food production in the Sahara and western Sudan describes the emergence and spread of cultivation and animal husbandry before and around the beginning of the Christian era. The passage presents agriculture as a developing combination of wild-food gathering, experimentation, and domestication, while treating the independent invention of West African agriculture as unresolved. Available evidence is said to favor transmission of cereal cultivation and domestic animals from South-West Asia through the Nile and perhaps the Maghrib.
Continue exploring
The Story
The Sahara and western Sudan entered the beginning of the Christian era with food production developing unevenly across different ecological zones. Earlier communities selected wild plants such as Digitaria, Pennisetum, Sorghum, Oryza glaberrima, and Dioscorea for gathering, creating what the passage calls a proto-agricultural stage. The transition involved both continued dependence on collected foods and the gradual adoption of cultivation and animal husbandry.
A central question concerns whether West African agriculture was invented independently or adapted from practices visible farther east. The text rejects the proposal that the upper Niger was the birthplace from which agriculture diffused toward the Nile, because the archaeological record there lacks the associated development of improved stone and bone-working, pottery, and settlements. Excavations at Kourounkoro-Kale and surveys upstream from Bamako instead reveal a relatively undeveloped stone industry.
The evidence summarized here favors transmission of cereal cultivation across the Sahara from South-West Asia by way of the Nile and perhaps the Maghrib. Domestic cattle, sheep, and goats may have accompanied that knowledge, while sedentary hunters, fishers, and existing plant-oriented communities adapted domesticates to local conditions. By the first millennium BC, small-scale agricultural societies are described as existing wherever rainfall allowed cultivation without irrigation, although food gathering remained essential in the Sudanic zone, Sahel, and Sahara.
From 10th century BCE
Sahara and western Sudan
Early food production in the Sahara and western Sudan describes the emergence and spread of cultivation and animal husbandry before and around the beginning of the Christian era. The passage presents agriculture as a developing combination of wild-food gathering, experimentation, and domestication, while treating the independent invention of West African agriculture as unresolved. Available evidence is said to favor transmission of cereal cultivation and domestic animals from South-West Asia through the Nile and perhaps the Maghrib.
Continue exploring
The Story
The Sahara and western Sudan entered the beginning of the Christian era with food production developing unevenly across different ecological zones. Earlier communities selected wild plants such as Digitaria, Pennisetum, Sorghum, Oryza glaberrima, and Dioscorea for gathering, creating what the passage calls a proto-agricultural stage. The transition involved both continued dependence on collected foods and the gradual adoption of cultivation and animal husbandry.
A central question concerns whether West African agriculture was invented independently or adapted from practices visible farther east. The text rejects the proposal that the upper Niger was the birthplace from which agriculture diffused toward the Nile, because the archaeological record there lacks the associated development of improved stone and bone-working, pottery, and settlements. Excavations at Kourounkoro-Kale and surveys upstream from Bamako instead reveal a relatively undeveloped stone industry.
The evidence summarized here favors transmission of cereal cultivation across the Sahara from South-West Asia by way of the Nile and perhaps the Maghrib. Domestic cattle, sheep, and goats may have accompanied that knowledge, while sedentary hunters, fishers, and existing plant-oriented communities adapted domesticates to local conditions. By the first millennium BC, small-scale agricultural societies are described as existing wherever rainfall allowed cultivation without irrigation, although food gathering remained essential in the Sudanic zone, Sahel, and Sahara.