Europe and South Asia in a Nutshell
The several dispersals of agriculture into and through South Asia were even more multiplex than those in Europe. We have three external sources of crops - Southwest Asia, northern Sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia - together with a degree of local domestication. In Europe, farming took 3,000 years to spread from Anatolia to the British Isles. In South Asia, it seems to have taken even longer to spread from northern Pakistan to Sri Lanka, without considering the relatively unknown chronology for early rice cultivation in the northeast. These early spreads of farming were clearly inexorable, even unstoppable in the long term, but they were not instantaneous. Along a given latitude, yes, there could be relative swiftness, as in the case of the northern coastline of the Mediterranean from Greece to Portugal. But across latitude, or across climatic divides, such as that from winter to summer rainfall that separates Iran and Afghanistan from the Ganges Basin, the rate was reduced to a heavy plod. However the farming spread, it was neither by quick-smart adoption by clever huntergatherers, nor was it by express trains carrying hungry farmers ever toward the horizon, leaving astonished and landless hunters in their wake.
Chapter 5
Africa: An Independent Focus of
Agricultural Development?
The African continent, with the exception of Egypt, does not yet have the density of archaeological coverage which would allow a discussion as detailed as that presented in chapters 3 and 4 for Southwest Asia, Europe, or South Asia. It is also orders of magnitude vaster than western Eurasia and was never dominated by just one region, similar in size to the Fertile Crescent, where evolution of agriculture from an indigenous hunter-gatherer background can so easily be demonstrated. We search for needles of information in a huge range of environments - deserts, savannas, mountains, and rain forests.
Until recently, the belt of grassland (the Sahel zone) and parkland (the Savanna zone) that today stretches across the continent between the Sahara and the rain forest, between about 5° and 15° north, was believed to be the homeland for a number of important native crops (Figure 5.1). New discoveries concerning Holocene climatic zonation in the Sahara, detailed below, now render this zone much more extensive toward the north. The most significant crops are summer-rainfall cereals, particularly African rice (Oryza glaberrima), pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor). Guinea yam (Dioscorea rotundata) was domesticated in the rain-forest fringes to the south, and finger millet (Eleusine coracana) further east, in Ethiopia or southern Sudan. Sub-Saharan agricultural populations subsisted on these and other African crops throughout their prehistory, whereas Egyptian and North African Neolithic populations depended on cereals and legumes of Southwest Asian origin, as did many populations of the Ethiopian Highlands (Barnett 1999; D'Andrea et al. 1999). No major crops or animals were ever domesticated in Africa south of the Equator.
In addition, Indonesian visitors contributed Southeast Asian crops such as
bananas, taro, and greater yams to tropical Africa, through movements perhaps connected with the Austronesian settlement of Madagascar at about 1,500 years ago. However, the recent finding of banana phytoliths in Cameroon dated to 500 BC (Watson and Woodhouse 2001; Mindzie et al. 2001) raises intriguing possibilities of Indian Ocean travel in much earlier times, a topic already discussed in connection with the transfer of African crops to India and Pakistan.
A major question for Africa is whether or not the Sahel and Savanna zones, and also the Ethiopian Highlands, contained one or more regions of primary agricultural origin. Currently, this is a most difficult question to answer, since sub-Saharan Africa has no archaeological evidence for domesticated crops until after 2000 BC. It does appear, however, that the Saharan region was much wetter than now in the early Holocene, owing to a northward shift of the monsoon and the belts of grassland and savanna, with a consequent shrinkage of the desert. The wild cereal "homelands" shown in Figure 5.1 would also have moved northward, as we know from the presence of wild sorghum in archaeological sites dating to the end of the Pleistocene in Egypt's Western Desert. This situation doubtless encouraged an increasing emphasis on wild annual cereal collection and possibly also native cattle management by about 8500 BC, and some groups also began to use incised, stamped, and impressed pottery in several Saharan and Nilotic regions by this time.
Figure 5.1 The major present-day vegetational regions of Africa, with Harlan's homelands for some of the major crops domesticated there. Also shown is the southern boundary of desert at about 8000 BC, when the Sahara was experiencing moister conditions than now. It should be noted that Harlan's homelands reflect present-day plant distributions; during the wetter phases of the Holocene these distributions would have moved significantly northward, especially for sorghum and pearl millet. Data from Harlan 1992; Marshall 1998;
Marshall and Hildebrand 2002.
Since these developments seem to have occurred before the first evidence for Asian sheep and goats in northeastern Africa (ca. 5500 Bc), they presumably owed nothing to the Southwest Asian agricultural economy or cultural sequence. However, no certain remains of domesticated animals or plants have ever been found in these early Saharan sites and there is as yet insufficient evidence to claim a food-producing subsistence pattern with full confidence. Before examining these issues further it is necessary to outline one aspect of African early agricultural prehistory that does have relatively clear definition.
The Spread of the Southwest Asian Agricultural Complex
into Egypt
By virtue of its origins in the African monsoon rainfall zone, the Nile Valley in Egypt has a flood regime almost perfect for the cereals and legumes that originated in Southwest Asia. This is why, of course, many scholars in the past regarded Egypt, erroneously, as a locus of agricultural origin. The Nile floods reach southern Egypt from mid-August and the delta four to six weeks later. The water is relatively free of salt and floods dampen the soil for about two months in autumn and winter, allowing crops to be grown with little further irrigation and without the hazards of salinization and low winter river levels which so afflicted contemporary Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
The main problem for the idea that Egypt was an origin locus for agriculture is that none of the relevant crops existed there in the wild. Paleolithic Egyptians, such as those who used the Wadi Kubanniya campsites (Figure 5.2) about 20,000 years ago, exploited fish, migrant birds, wild cattle, gazelle, and hartebeest, and used grindstones to prepare a toxic tuber (Cyperus rotund us) for leaching prior to consumption (Wendorf et al. 1980; Hillman 1989; Jensen et al. 1991; Close 1996). Although grains of barley and einkorn were found in Wadi Kubanniya early in the investigations, more accurate dating has shown that they are intrusive into the sediments, and of recent date. It now seems that the late glacial Nile Valley in Egypt, at that time hyper-arid, supported no major cereals at all. The glossed stone blades once regarded as cereal harvesters are now assumed to have been used for harvesting wetland tubers and possibly palm fruits.
Figure 5.2 Archaeological sites of northern Africa discussed in the text
When the Wadi Kubanniya campsites were occupied, the alluvium-filled late glacial Nile valley had both low water levels and low evaporation. The floodplain retained seasonal channels and pools of water - a landscape fairly attractive for mobile hunters and gatherers. As the climate became warmer and wetter at the end of the Pleistocene, the increasing Nile flood-power scoured out the alluvium toward the low sea level, producing an incised valley within which there are very few signs of human settlement. With the eventual rise and stabilization of sea level close to its current height during the early Holocene, the Nile Delta was able to recommence growth, and the valley began to refill with the rich alluvial soil which much later was to support the citizens of Pharaonic Egypt.
According to Stanley and Warne (1993), this stabilization and alluviation commenced between 6500 and 5500 Bc, although Hassan (1997a) favors an earlier date, starting about 10,000 BC. Whichever is correct, the striking fact remains that the Nile Valley cannot be demonstrated to have been settled by agriculturalists until about 5500-5000 BC, at which time a full agropastoral economy with pottery was introduced from Southwest Asia. Unless an aceramic Neolithic has been totally submerged beneath the Nile alluvium (MidantReynes 2000:106), the Nile Valley received its agriculture even later than
Greece and Italy, a circumstance which, from the perspective offered in chapter 2, surely reflects the forbidding presence of the Sinai desert barrier between Palestine and the Nile Delta. Like the Californian Indians, early Holocene Egyptians did not need agriculture and did not seek it, until the tables turned and agriculture sought them as a result of dispersal events originating in the southern Levant.
When agriculturalists first entered the Nile Valley at about 5500 BC, other people who made pottery, collected wild sorghum, and, according to some authorities, herded cattle, had already been living at Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba in Egypt's Western Desert for possibly 3,000 years, during periodic and brief phases of wetter climate (Wendorf et al. 2001; Dahlberg and Wasylikowa 1996; Wasylikowa and Dahlberg 1999; Close 1996). There is no clear evidence that such populations were living in the Nile Valley itself at this time, but the possibility must be considered. Mid-Holocene dessication of the Sahara with retraction of the summer monsoon finally led to virtual abandonment of Nabta Playa and other oasis settlements by about 4000 ac, and this might have led to a kind of refuge movement into the Nile Valley, where Saharan people would have met and mixed with the descendants of the Southwest Asian Neolithic population responsible for the introduction of the Southwest Asian agricultural tradition into the Nile Valley about 1,500 years earlier. The resulting amalgam was later to develop into one of the most remarkable civilizations of the ancient world, a true synthesis of the Oriental and the African.
Within the Egyptian Neolithic lifestyle are found a number of specific cultural items of presumed Palestinian origin, even though no precise source can be pinpointed. Such items include side-notched and tanged bifacially flaked arrowheads (Helwan points - Figure 3.5 /1 - occurring in the PPNA and PPNB in the Levant as well as in the Nile Valley), pear-shaped maceheads, polished stone axes, footed pottery different from the incised and impressed wares of the Sudan and Saharan early Holocene sites, together with emmer wheat, barley, flax and linen, pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats (Arkell 1975; Hassan 1988; Koslowski and Ginter 1989; Smith 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000). These items appear suddenly in the archaeological record, suggesting introduction, except for the cattle which could, according to recent genetic research, have been domesticated from native stock in North Africa (Bradley et al. 1996; Bradley and Loftus 2000; Hanotte et al. 2002).
The western and southern regions of Arabia were also wetter than now in the early and middle Holocene, so a possibility of cultural transmission across the Red Sea or Bab al Mandab must be borne in mind. However, the archaeological record of Arabia so far reveals no clear evidence for Neolithic agriculture (Edens and Wilkinson 1998), despite a presence in southern Arabia of what appear to be early Holocene check dams for trapping soil (McCorriston and Oches 2001). Phillipson (1998:41) notes the presence of villages during the third millennium BC in the Yemen highlands, with domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs.
In the Neolithic sites of the Fayum depression, the new agricultural economy is represented by deep storage pits lined with basketry and straw matting that could hold up to 200-300 kilograms of grain. The Fayum lithics, with sickle blades, flake axes, and hollow-based projectile points, show no signs of continuity from the preceding microlithic industries of the region. Like the early pottery of the Levant, that of the Fayum sites is chaff-tempered. These sites have not yielded any architectural evidence, but a site at Merimde near the western edge of the Nile delta, approximately contemporary with the Fayum sites, has yielded remains of post and matting shelters and mud-walled oval houses with semi-subterranean floors, arranged along paths. Merimde appears to have covered about 2.4 hectares and has similar pottery and a similar economy to that of the Fayum.
Indeed, the basal level of Merimde also has Helwan points, clay figurines, and herringbone-incised pottery, the latter paralleled in the Yarmukian ceramic Neolithic of the Jordan Valley (Kantor 1992), a period of small village agriculture with associated goat pastoralism established at about 6000 ac, following the PPNC agricultural decline. This decline in itself also offers a strong hint as to why movement into the Nile Valley might have occurred (Hassan 2002, 2003). Sling stones and spindle whorls also suggest Palestinian connections, but architecturally, of course, these Egyptian villages of wattle and daub huts would have appeared very different from the contemporary mud brick villages typical of the Fertile Crescent.
All of this suggests that the Egyptian Predynastic of the millennium prior to Unification was an amalgam of a Southwest Asian economy and technology with cultural traditions of native Nile and Saharan origin, the latter in evidence in the Badarian Neolithic of Upper (southern) Egypt with its black-topped
pottery (Hassan 1997b; Midant-Reynes 2000). Which tradition(s) ultimately dominated, in terms of language and population source, is a matter to be discussed later with respect to the ancestry of the Afroasiatic language family.
As far as the rest of Mediterranean North Africa is concerned, details are few, but the Southwest Asian Neolithic economy with sheep, goats, and cattle can certainly be traced during the sixth millennium ac at the cave of Haua Fteah in Cyrenaica, presumably heading west. A spread of pastoral peoples along the North African coastline is of course likely; pottery and evidence for sheep/goat herding occur along the Moroccan and Algerian coastlines dating from about 5500 BC. But the arrival time of cereal agriculture here is less clear, with current estimates not extending back much before 2000 ac (Holl 1998; David Lubell pers. comm.).
So far, therefore, the spread of the Southwest Asian economy into Egypt and its amalgamation with a Saharan tradition of pottery usage and cattle exploitation seems well documented. South of Egypt, the Fertile Crescent cereals soon met a barrier in the monsoonal summer-rainfall climate of Sudan, and their spread into the more suitable climatic conditions of the Ethiopian Highlands seems to have occurred only within the past 3,000 years (Barnett 1999; D'Andrea et al. 1999; Bard et al. 2000). But what of the rest of the African continent? Here we enter an arena of truly gigantic geographical scale.