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Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2002 (°
Cattle Before Crops: The Beginnings of Food
Production in Africa
Fiona Marshall1,2 and Elisabeth Hildebrand1
In many areas of the world, current theories for agricultural origins emphasize 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 delayedreturn 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 regional 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 understanding the circumstances that led to domestication in other regions of the
world.
KEY WORDS: archaeology; Africa; predictability; cattle domestication.
INTRODUCTION
It is generally agreed that pathways to food production have varied
greatly from place to place around the world (reviews in Cowan and Watson,
1992; Diamond, 1997; Gebauer and Price, 1992; Harris, 1996a; Harris and
Hillman, 1989; Piperno and Pearsall, 1998; Price and Gebauer, 1995; Smith,
1998). Agriculture appears to have arisen recently (<10,000 years ago) and
1 Department
of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.
whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Anthropology, Campus
Box 1114, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130;
e-mail: fmarshal@artsci.wustl.edu.
2 To
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rarely, in only a few independent transitions (Harris, 1996b; Smith, 1998).
The profound, long-lasting effects of agriculture on human societies include
higher population densities and more urban-based, stratified social systems.
Today’s global distribution of wealth and political power may reflect variation in the characteristics and timing of early food production (Diamond,
1997), but the precise nature of, and reasons for, this variation are not yet
well understood.
Some of the most intensively studied regions where indigenous food
producing economies developed include Southwest Asia, Mesoamerica, and
Eastern North America. Recent syntheses drawing on data from some of
these areas emphasize post-Pleistocene climatic change, the domestication
of plants before animals, and the role of settled hunter-gatherers in the
development of early food production (Bar-Yosef, 1998; Harris, 1996b,c;
Price and Gebauer, 1995; but see Piperno and Pearsall, 1998). They also note
that domestication occurred in well-watered places with relatively abundant
resources, rather than in marginal settings (Price and Gebauer, 1995; Smith,
1998). For some regions, scholars point to centers from which entire crop
complexes spread through colonization (Harris, 1996b,c). Elsewhere, more
attention is given to diffusion and the involvement of local hunter-gatherers
in the spread of food production (Price and Gebauer, 1995).
Africa is less well known than the regions from which most syntheses
have been drawn, but research published in the last decade has clarified
African data on early food production (Blench and MacDonald, 2000; van
der Veen, 1999). Rather than fitting into broad patterns known from other
parts of the world, pathways to food production in Africa are distinctive.
New genetic data support archaeological hypotheses of early Holocene domestication of cattle in northeast Africa. The earliest African food producers
were mobile herders, not sedentary farmers. Herding developed in marginal
areas, and then spread patchily across the Sahara and to the south as climatic conditions deteriorated. Although complex strategies for plant use
developed early in Africa (c. 17,000 BP), plant domestication was late (after
4000 BP), and occurred in many different environments.
To date, no models have addressed the multiple pathways to food production in the African continent. In this paper, we examine reasons for
three of the most distinctive African themes: early domestication of cattle
in northeast Africa, patchy spread of food production, and late domestication of African plants. We argue that a desire for increased predictability
had a significant influence on all three of these African patterns. In the following section, we develop an ethnoarchaeologically based model that links
the need for predictability in daily food supply to specific contexts in which
domestication is likely. A better understanding of distinct African patterns
and a new examination of the importance of short-term predictability as a
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motivator for domestication may contribute to understanding factors influencing subsistence intensification and variation in trajectories toward food
production in other regions of the world.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DAY-TO-DAY PREDICTABILITY AND
SCHEDULED CONSUMPTION
Since Lee’s research of the 1960s, which suggested that hunter-gatherers
often work less than farmers (Lee, 1968; but see Hawkes and O’Connell,
1981), archaeologists have emphasized the productivity of farming (it can
support many people per unit area) as the major advantage of agriculture
over hunting and gathering. Current theories for agricultural origins focus
on population growth, environmental deterioration, and social or economic
gain (reviews in Cowan and Watson, 1992; Price and Gebauer, 1995); despite
diverging specific emphases, they share the premise that domestication occurred because humans wanted larger quantities of certain resources. A number of scholars have emphasized risk and the need for a predictable food supply (Flannery, 1986; Redding, 1988; Smith, 1998; Wills, 1995; Winterhalder
and Goland, 1997). But the more common view, well expressed in current
textbooks, is that understanding the reason for increased food yields is key
to understanding the origins of agriculture (Crabtree and Campana, 2001,
p. 242). Surprisingly little research has focused on individual human motivations during early stages of the domestication process, however. The end
results of agriculture—visible today as larger yields, higher carrying capacity, denser stands of crops, larger seeds and seed heads, or greater animal
productivity—were not necessarily realized during the earliest phases of the
domestication process. Human motivations for initial manipulation of plants
and animals thus remain an open question.
Historic, anthropological, and ethnobotanical accounts of tending and
transplanting wild plants by hunter-gatherers are potentially valuable sources
of information on this issue (e.g. Steward, 1938; Turner and Kuhnlein, 1982;
reviews in Harris and Hillman, 1989; Lourandros, 1997). In many cases,
however, domestication was not the focus of research, and specific reasons
for intensification are unclear (Hayden, 1990, versus Keeley, 1995). Ethnoarchaeological research seems the most promising source of new data on
processes of domestication. Studies have identified modes of selection that
lead to domestication, such as the use of sickles to harvest cereals (Hillman
and Davies, 1990) or breeding only the most tamable individual animals
(Trut, 1999). Researchers recognize that planting selected plants and captive
breeding of desired animals are essential to maintaining selection and to the
domestication process. Yet, ethnoarchaeological research has not focused
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on the precise contexts in which people living in small-scale societies find it
advantageous to capture and breed plants or animals.
In this section, we use ethnoarchaeological data to address the question of why, during the domestication process, people perform the critical
steps of sowing, relocating, or capturing plants and animals from the wild.
We follow Harris’s conceptual framework for degrees of intensification in
interactions between humans and plants and animals (Harris, 1989, 1996b;
see also Hillman and Davies, 1990). Our ethnoarchaeological studies focus
on motives for domestication among hunter-gatherers and extensive farmers
currently adopting wild resources into domestic contexts. Marshall (2001)
lived among Okiek, hunter-gatherers of Kenya during 1989–90, many of
whom were farming at the time. Hildebrand (2001) studied shifting cultivators of forests and grasslands of southwest Ethiopia; she lived with the
northeast Sheko during 1998–2000, and collected data on local crops and
land use in nearby Gura Ferda and northern Dizi areas. In both studies, we
found that people want to be able to schedule use of certain resources, and
so manipulate plants and animals to ensure predictable access.
We think that the motivations we observed for the capture and breeding
of plants and animals are relevant (sensu Wylie, 1985) to those of any group of
people contemplating the initial manipulation of wild resources. Knowledge
of horticulture does not negate the relevance of these decisions, and presentday motivations for plant manipulation can inform considerations of early
herding. This is true because, although decisions to capture or manipulate
plants and animals may lead to domestication or adoption of domesticates,
domestication is not necessarily the goal envisaged at the time of initial
manipulation. Small, discrete steps in the domestication process reflect more
general decisions about resource intensification. These arise in particular
contexts (time, place, and social setting) of resource use, and are made by
hunter-gatherers, horticulturists, and pastoralists alike. Understanding such
contexts is key to understanding the reasons for capture and breeding of
plants and animals by ancient people.
The Case Studies
Sheko and northern Dizi farmers who harvest yams (Dioscorea cayenensis 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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Dizi areas, families historically transplanted yams from sparsely populated
lowlands, where spontaneous yams are abundant, to denser upland settlements, where they are rare. Yams growing spontaneously near upland settlements are left in place. Northern Dizi yam transplantation thus focuses on
making resources distant from settlements more accessible. Adoptive transplantation is almost never practiced among the people of Gura Ferda, a
third subgroup of the Sheko–Dizi ethnic entity. Demands for increased predictability at Gura Ferda are low because spontaneous yams are abundant
and easy to find; furthermore, residential mobility in Gura Ferda is much
higher in terms of both frequency and distance of moves, so that transplantation would not make access to yams much easier or more predictable in
the long term. These examples show that the need for predictable access to
certain foods can motivate people to capture and propagate plants; this is
especially true for individuals who have an exceptional need for the plant,
live in locations where the desired plant is relatively scarce, or invest in a
long-term occupation site. Moving either a plant or an animal near a house
guarantees predictable access, so that people can monitor the resource and
schedule its consumption.
Piik ap Oom Okiek also manipulate the distribution of wild plants, and
plant some of them in domestic settings. Okiek families eat wild and weedy
greens every day, but it is not the most desired greens that are sown or
transplanted. Instead, effort is put into manipulating only those plants that
are uncommon or not conveniently located (Marshall, 2001). Basella, for
example, is an edible wild climbing shrub most common in steep ravines.
Families often transplant one or two plants to the doorways of their homes.
Similarly, Gynandropsis is a weed of disturbed ground, which families may
sow if it does not spontaneously reseed near houses. Some less mobile Piik ap
Oom families now also transplant a tree (Dracaena sp.), a creeper (Periploca
sp.), and a high-altitude grass (Eleusine sp.) used in initiation and marriage
ceremonies. All cases of planting and manipulation of these resources affect
distribution more than abundance. Planting edible wild plants where they
are accessible is a form of living storage. Through day-to-day monitoring of
the depredations of pests, predators, and neighbors, individuals know the
status of the plant and its availability for consumption or use. Concern is
for predictable availability of plants eaten regularly or used at important
ceremonies, not for increased yield. Manipulation is likely in contexts where
families are staying in one place for a long period, where the distribution
of desired plants is not convenient, or where ceremonies are about to take
place.
The need for precise scheduling also shapes Okiek choices of animal
species for different consumption events. Okiek modes of meat acquisition
(trapping, hunting with spears, or use of domestic animals) differ in the
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predictability of their outcome. When Piik ap Oom families eat meat, it is
usually wild (giant forest hog or bushbuck), but at ceremonies or gatherings, domestic sheep, goat, or cattle are used exclusively. Domestic animals
provide no more meat than wild animals, and have no ritual significance. In
fact, the “wild” is especially important in Okiek ceremonies (Kratz, 1994),
but domestic stock is favored for ceremonies and gatherings because of its
predictable availability.
Okiek use of cattle provides examples of contexts in which close control over animals may be extremely desirable. Thus cattle, although domesticated, help us to understand potential circumstances in which wild animals
are likely to have been domesticated prehistorically. Scheduled ceremonies
create a clear need for easily and predictably available meat, which is best
supplied by penned animals. The relation between scheduled consumption
events, an increased need for predictablity, and capture of wild animals is
supported by recently reported practices of the Conibo-Shipibo of the Peruvian Amazon, who capture, pen, and feed manatees, peccaries, and monkeys
in preparation for feasts (DeBoer, 2001).
Despite great differences in socioeconomic organization and environment among these ethnoarchaeological cases, they reveal similar contexts
and motivations for manipulating resources. People often manipulate plants
and animals in situations where the need for predictable access or scheduled
consumption is especially great. We argue that these needs shaped prehistoric decisions to manipulate resources in ways that led to domestication.
Although higher yield is a popularly cited advantage of food production and
does affect later phases of agricultural innovation, the need for predictable
access may have been a more important catalyst in many domestication
events.
The Model
Intensification and domestication are structurally linked to the need for
predictable day-to-day access and scheduled consumption. Understanding
this connection makes it possible to move beyond the particulars of our
studies to model a broader range of contexts in which predictable access to
specific resources can become an especially prominent concern. We begin by
identifying contexts that make predictable access to resources desirable, and
go on to examine the relationship between these contexts and the large-scale
social, economic, and ecological processes that create them. This approach
fits the large anthropological literature on the risk of going without food
in spatially and temporally variable environments (Cashdan, 1990; Halstead
and O’Shea, 1989; Kelly, 1995). It also echoes the archaeological literature on
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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 concern in settings where sedentism is increasing, plant abundance is decreasing, or prey mobility is increasing. Increasing sedentism can make distant
resources difficult to collect, so that access becomes unpredictable. Transplanting, sowing, or otherwise moving the resource to the locus of human
occupation restores the compromised predictability of that resource. Decreased abundance of certain plants, or increased mobility of prey can also
bring about a crisis in predictability. In both situations, a formerly dependable 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 ecological 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, overexploitation, 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 ceremonial 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, proximate contexts in which predictability becomes crucial, and manipulation
practices meant to restore or enhance predictable access and scheduled consumption. We think the utility of this scheduled consumption–predictability
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 explain much about the domestication and spread of cattle, the patchy spread
of food production, and the late domestication of plants.
SCHEDULED CONSUMPTION AND THE DOMESTICATION OF
CATTLE
What circumstances might have prompted North Africans to capture
and domesticate cattle? In western Asia, where studies of the domestication
of cattle have a long history, scholars have emphasized religious motives
(reviewed in Isaac, 1962). These theories are compatible with our emphasis
on scheduling, and identification of ceremonies as settings in which domestication is likely. But the scheduled consumption model allows us to identify
a broader range of settings in which capturing and domestication of cattle
would have been advantageous—contexts in which people need to maintain
or increase predictable access to key resources. These are most likely to arise
amid ecological perturbations, such as drought or disease, or among sedentary populations clustered around concentrations of resources. We examine
the influence of these factors on North African hunter-gatherers immediately prior to domestication, and develop a theory for the domestication of
African cattle in the eastern Sahara.
Climate and Society Before Food Production
It is widely recognized that the more arid a region, the greater the variability in the amount, location, and timing of rainfall, both within seasons
and between years (Coppock, 1993; Nicholson, 1980). Nonequilibrium systems exist in arid regions of Africa today (less than 300 mm p.a.), where the
coefficient of variation in rainfall often exceeds 30%. Unpredictable rainfall 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, punctuated by a cold, dry phase c. 11,350–10,250 BP, peaked c. 9500–8500 BP.
Rainfall decreased gradually across North Africa after c. 8000 BP, with regional 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 mountain 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. 8700–8600 BP
(Hassan, 2000; Wendorf et al., 1984, 2001). The Saharan region saw many
short arid phases, and two marked ones c. 8000/7500–7000/6500 BP and 4500–
3000 BP (Grove, 1993; Hassan, 1997). More localized droughts occurred c.
9500–9000 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 created 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 activities did not result in domestication. Later, c. 13,000–12,500 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 repopulated 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), Epipaleolithic (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 cereals. At Ti-n-Torha East rockshelter in the Acacus, people built stone structures (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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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 Sahara–Sahel 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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sites of the tenth to ninth millennia BP preserve abundant ceramics, as well as
wild ungulates, fish, molluscs, grindstones, and wild grasses (Caneva, 1988;
Haaland, 1987; Magid and Caneva, 1998; Peters, 1986). With concepts of
ownership based on storage facilities and ceramics, some of these groups in
the central and southern Sahara probably followed a delayed-return strategy of hunting and gathering (Barich, 1998; Dale et al., in press; Di Lernia,
2001).
Domestication of Cattle in North Africa: Timing and Location
Cattle were the earliest domesticates in Africa. Recent studies suggest
that they were probably domesticated from North African populations of
wild Bos primigenius by hunter-gatherers of the eastern Sahara 10,000–8000
BP. Their origins are still controversial, but Gautier (1980, 1987a, 2001) and
Wendorf (Close and Wendorf, 1992; Wendorf et al., 1984, 2001; Wendorf and
Schild, 1980) argue for domestic cattle in the eastern Sahara at Bir Kiseiba
c. 9500 BP, and Nabta Playa c. 8840 BP (Figs. 1 and 2). Because these sites
preserved few cattle bones, evidence for morphological change is difficult to
evaluate (Grigson, 2000; Smith, 1986). Wendorf and colleagues buttress the
admittedly scarce morphological data with an ecological argument: without
human intervention, survival of wild cattle in the arid eastern Sahara would
have been unlikely (Close and Wendorf, 1992; Wendorf et al., 1984; Wendorf
and Schild, 1998). Cattle are present to the west at Enneri Bardagué in the
Tibesti by c. 7400 BP and in the Acacus by c. 7400–6700 BP (Garcea, 1995;
Gautier, 1987a). There are no early domestic cattle in the Nile Valley.
Recent morphological and genetic research provides some support for
Wendorf’s hypothesis. Grigson’s morphological study (Grigson, 1991, 2000)
shows that Egyptian cattle of the fifth millennium BP had long, slender limbs
morphologically distinct from those of Eurasian humpless cattle (Bos taurus)
and Zebu (Bos indicus). On this basis, she suggests that African cattle may
have been domesticated from wild Bos primigenius in Africa. Recent research on genetic variation in breeds of present-day African cattle points to
a similar conclusion (Bradley et al., 1996; Bradley and Loftus, 2000; Hanotte
et al., 2002). Genetic distance between African cattle and Asian Bos taurus
is sufficient to define the two as discrete genetic populations (Bradley et al.,
1996; Bradley and Loftus, 2000). Bradley and colleagues argue that wild cattle in Eurasia, Bos primigenius primigenius, and in Africa, Bos primigenius
opisthonomus, diverged by 22,000 years ago, and propose that African populations of wild cattle were domesticated in Africa. Together, archaeological
and recent genetic evidence indicate a single geographic origin for domestic
cattle in the eastern Sahara (Gautier, 1987a; Hanotte et al., 2002).
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Fig. 2. Distribution of sites with early domestic cattle.
The earliest domestic sheep and goat in Africa appear c. 7000–6700 BP
in the eastern Sahara and the Red Sea Hills (Close, 1992, 2002; Gautier,
1987a; Vermeersch et al., 1996). They almost certainly come from western
Asia (Gautier, 1984a), because there are no wild ancestors for sheep and
goat in Africa. Close (2002) argues that sheep and goat came to Africa
via the southern Sinai before Near Eastern crop complex, which is thought
(Wetterstrom, 1993) to have entered the continent through the Nile Valley.
The fact that sheep and goats postdate domestic cattle is further evidence for
indigenous domestication of cattle in North Africa. More archaeological data
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are needed, however, including large, well-dated faunal samples, enclosures
with cattle dung, and sites that immediately predate domestic cattle in the
eastern Sahara. The origins of African cattle are thus still controversial,
but genetic and morphological data together strongly suggest independent
domestication in Africa.
Given the sparseness of faunal data from Nabta and Kiseiba and the
absence of slightly older sites, specific application of the scheduled consumption model to small-scaled analyses of sites or household economies at the
time of domestication is not yet possible. Application of the scheduled consumption model in more general terms is worthwhile, however, because it
allows us to explore specific relations between short-term predictability and
resource intensification in North Africa.
Domestication of Cattle and the Scheduled Consumption Model
Archaeological evidence suggests that cattle were domesticated in the
eastern Sahara during the tenth millennium BP. Nabta, located in the driest
part of the Sahara, received too little rainfall at this time (less than 300 mm p.
a.) to sustain wild cattle. Domestication probably took place slightly farther
west, in areas capable of supporting cattle. In marginal areas of the eastern
Sahara, human populations concentrated in playa basins (Close, 2001; Close
and Wendorf, 1992; Wendorf et al., 1984, 2001; Wendorf and Schild, 1998)
or massifs. We argue that hunter-gatherers in these settings domesticated
cattle to ensure their predictable availability as a food source. Both ecological perturbations, especially recurring cycles of aridity, and concentration of
resources and people in playa basins, could have precipitated an increased
need for predictability. Ritual use of cattle may also have provided a specific context in which scheduled consumption would have been especially
desirable.
Given that aridity is a recurring theme in North Africa, the question
remains: why did domestication occur c. 9000 BP in marginal circumstances,
rather than amidst arid conditions c. 17,000 BP, when human populations
concentrated in the Nile Valley? We think that subtle variation in rainfall
is more important to day-to-day predictability than acute aridity. During
the last glacial maximum, environments were so extreme that conditions
were quite predictable in most places. The Sahara was predictably dry, and
uninhabited. People lived in the Nile Valley, close to water, where other
resources were also dependable. In contrast, conditions in parts of the eastern Sahara c. 9000 BP were only marginal. There was sufficient rainfall for
arid-adapted resources, but not enough for their distribution to be reliable.
Although humans could survive under these circumstances, planning was
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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 domestication 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. Archaeological, genetic, and climatic evidence together suggest that domestic cattle
spread from a point origin—perhaps a small playa near the Jebel Marra
massif in northwest Sudan, or east of the Tibesti in northeastern Chad—
during the tenth–ninth millennium BP.
Hunter-gatherers of this region faced a nonequilibrium rainfall system
with generally unpredictable rainfall, as well as short-term climatic fluctuations. 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 local hunter-gatherers intensified their use of wild animal herds rather than
their harvesting of wild plants for several reasons. Plant productivity is especially vulnerable to variation in rainfall, because the timing of rainfall relative to plant growth phases is crucial (Le Houérou 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 tenth–ninth millennia 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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low-rank resources such as grains, which necessitated cumbersome grindstones for processing. Following resilient herds of large wild ungulates, such
as cattle or hartebeest, would have reduced risk and constituted generalization by proxy, because the animals processed more diverse plant resources
than humans could.
In such arid conditions, however, locating herds of ungulates would have
been difficult, and access to animal products would have remained unpredictable because of erratic rainfall and the high mobilities and low densities
of wild herds. Sporadic access to herds would have impeded attempts to monitor herd size, composition, nutritional status, and the effects of disease and
carnivore predation. This would have limited knowledge of their condition,
and made scheduled consumption events (from large ceremonies to daily
family meals) difficult to plan. Such scheduling would have been especially
important to delayed-return hunter-gatherers of the early Holocene in the
Sahara, because broad social networks, consolidated by periodic gatherings,
would have helped to spread risks in an uncertain environment. A ceremonial role for cattle at such gatherings would have provided social, as well as
dietary, motivation for humans to achieve or maintain predictable access to
cattle through control of herds.
Cattle would have been the logical focus of intensification for many
reasons. Wild cattle would have been the main meat source for Saharan
hunter-gatherers (Hassan, 2000). They were grassland-adapted herd animals (Gautier and van Neer, 1989), and would have been the easiest large
North African ungulate to tame. Barbary sheep are territorial and found
in small groups, and gazelle and other antelope are notoriously difficult to
domesticate (Clutton-Brock, 1981; Diamond, 1997; Haltenorth and Diller,
1988, p. 105; Lewis, 1977), whereas cattle have proven amenable to domestication multiple times in different parts of the world (Bradley et al., 1996;
Grigson, 1989; Meadow, 1996). This is probably due to their size (energetic
efficiency), rapid growth, and behavioral characteristics (ease of breeding
in captivity, lack of territoriality, and well-developed dominance hierarchy)
(Clutton-Brock, 1981; Diamond, 1997). Tame animals could have been controlled by corralling them overnight in brush enclosures. Provisioning (wells
or salt), taming, bleeding, milking, and selective breeding would have followed. Taming cattle and protecting them from predators at night would have
required substantial commitment of labor, however (Marshall, 2000), and
the sustained effort required is likely to have occurred only among delayedreturn hunter-gatherers with storage technology (ceramics) and concepts of
ownership.
We have stressed the importance of predictability in the domestication
of cattle. During droughts, yield and predictability both would have declined, however. Might people have corralled cattle to increase yield rather
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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
(O’Connell et al., 1992). In contrast, African pastoralists today harvest only
4–8% of the cattle herd a year; in areas where drought and disease are common, 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
tenth–ninth millennium followed herds, and subsequently domesticated cattle in order to increase day-to-day predictability and reduce risk by manipulating 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 domestication of cattle also fit with well-known strategies for increasing longterm predictability: storage, mobility, and sharing (Halstead and O’Shea,
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-Hudson’s
(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 sharing, 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.
THE SPREAD OF FOOD PRODUCTION IN AFRICA: WHY SO
PATCHY?
The spread of food production on the African continent was strikingly
uneven: hunter-gatherers and food producers coexisted in all regions long
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after initial contact or colonization by food producers. This was due to different 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 during 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 understanding continent-wide variability in pathways to food production. Parts of the
western Sahara and the African rainforests that are important to the domestication of plants—and where livestock adoption follows patterns similar to
those in other regions—are discussed in a subsequent section on African
plant domestication.
Northeast and Northwest Africa
Pastoral occupation at Nabta c. 8000 BP provides an early example of
a characteristic African pattern of early food production. The settlement is
highly structured but mobile and seasonal, rather than village-based. Site
E75–6 has at least two rows of hut floors with associated cooking holes,
storage pits, many grindstones, and two large wells that could have been
used to water herds of cattle (Banks, 1984; Close and Wendorf, 1992; Wendorf
and Schild, 1998). A wide range of wild plants were collected. Use of wild
sorghum may have been intensive (Wasylikowa et al., 1993, 1997), but E75–6
was only occupied seasonally (Close and Wendorf, 1992; Królik and Schild,
2001).
As rainfall became lower and more variable in North Africa, pastoralism
spread unevenly from the eastern Sahara to the Tibesti and Acacus massifs
and the west African Sahara between c. 7000 and 5000 BP (Fig. 2). Even after
the introduction of stock, the new subsistence economy was generalized, and
Saharan pastoralists hunted and sometimes fished (Clark et al., 1973; Gautier,
1987a; Smith, 1980). Early Holocene patterns of plant use also persisted at
Uan Muhuggiag and Adrar Bous (Smith, 1980; Wasylikowa, 1993), although
smaller quantities of grindstones at some sites suggest less processing of wild
plants than previously (Barich, 1987).
Localized, unpredictable rainfall necessitated long-distance movements
to exploit variable topography and vegetation for water and pasture
(Muzzolini, 1993; Smith, 1992a). Herders at Adrar Bous and Acacus sites
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were more mobile than earlier hunter-gatherers (Barich, 1987; Gautier,
1987b; Smith, 1992a). Upper levels at Torha North and Uan Muhuggiag
preserve discontinuous laminae of dung, suggesting seasonal use of the shelters as livestock pens (Cremaschi et al., 1996; Gautier and van Neer, 1977–
82). Although herders seasonally occupied large sites near playas at Nabta
and Dakhleh c. 7900–5500 BP (Close, 1992; McDonald, 1998a), ephemeral
sites are more common throughout the Sahara (Barich, 1998; Close, 1990;
Gabriel, 1987). Pastoral rock art attests to the symbolic importance of domestic cattle (Holl, 1999; Muzzolini, 1993; Smith, 1992), as do cattle burials
c. 6500 BP near Adrar Bous and at Nabta (Applegate et al., 2001; Malville
et al., 1998; Paris, 2000; Wendorf and Królik, 2001; Wendorf and Schild,
1998). Rituals associated with cattle may have occurred at seasonal meetings of pastoral groups or lineages, and helped to consolidate emerging social
and political networks.
Highly mobile pastoral land use minimized competition with huntergatherers. Even after herding was widespread, hunter-gatherers lived near
pastoral groups until c. 7000 BP in the eastern Sahara at Dakhleh Bashendi-A
(McDonald, 1998a), and until c. 5500 BP in the west-central Sahara at Amekni
(Camps, 1968). Spatial variation in conditions made sedentary hunting and
gathering unsustainable in different places at different times, and contributed
to the patchy spread of herding.
After c. 6500 BP, rainfall decreased. Broader pastoral contacts and exchange systems (McDonald, 1992; Smith, 1980, 1992a) may have buffered deteriorating conditions. Green vitric tuff and Amazon stone were traded thousands of kilometers (Clark, 1970; McDonald, 1992). Nevertheless, successful
herding was short-term in some places: in the late-middle sixth millennium
BP pastoral occupation ceased, at least temporarily, at Dakhleh BashendiB, Abu Ballas, and in the Nabta-Kiseiba area (McDonald, 1998a,b). Some
herders responded to increasing aridity by emphasizing small stock, increasing mobility (Gautier, 1987a), and moving south to better-watered areas.
Much of the eastern Sahara was depopulated by c. 5500 BP, and central
Saharan montane sites such as Uan Muhuggiag were abandoned by c. 5000 BP
(Barich, 1998; Close, 1992). Herders entered the Khartoum Nile by c. 5500 BP
(Gautier, 1987a; Peters, 1986), the west African Sahel by c. 4500–3500 BP
(Breunig et al., 1996; Holl, 1998; MacDonald and MacDonald, 2000; Smith,
1992a), and the forest margin by c. 3000 BP (Stahl, 1985; van Neer, 2000).
The Sudanese Central Nile and Greater Eastern Africa
Chronology and relations between Sudanese and Saharan areas (Paris,
2000; Smith, 1992a) suggest that domestic stock were introduced from the
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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 dependable, 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). Domestic animals are the dominant large mammals at many sites, such as
Kadero c. 5000–4000 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 children 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 domestic cattle in the Horn of Africa date to c. 3500–2500 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 reflect 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. 6000–3300 BP (Ambrose, 1998) and wild animal diseases
(Gifford-Gonzalez, 2000) may have slowed the spread of herding in southern 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 availability 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 traditions (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 extensive 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 southern 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 ungulates (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. 248–249). 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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with local hunter-gatherer groups, perhaps through marriage alliances. In
this way, some hunter-gatherers would have assimilated into herding groups,
but herders could fall back among hunter-gatherer groups in case of stock
loss to drought or disease. Social and economic systems continued to be
fluid in the central Rift Valley until recent times: hunter-gatherer and pastoral groups interacted regularly, some hunter-gatherers adopted food production, and pastoralists periodically suffered stock losses (Marshall, 1994;
Mutundu, 1999; Spear and Waller, 1993).
Southern Africa
Adoption of food production in southern Africa followed a different
trajectory from that in the northern half of the continent. Although small
groups of pastoralists are thought to have entered parts of southern Africa
early, disease was a barrier to domestic stock. The introduction of domestic
animals and plants is closely associated with the rapid spread of Early Iron
Age farmers c. 1600 BP. Mixed agriculture became common in the extreme
east, and herding in the west of South Africa. South of the Orange River,
hunting and gathering continued across the interior of the subcontinent.
The earliest pastoralists may have been so mobile and patchily distributed as to be archaeologically invisible in some places. It has long been
thought that early herders spread from Zimbabwe and Zambia south,
and that stone-using Khoisan groups may have brought sheep and pottery
from the Zambezi through Namibia to the Cape by 2000 BP (Klein, 1984;
Smith, 2000). Some scholars suggest, however, that ceramics and small stock
both spread south through exchange networks between hunter-gatherers
and Iron Age farmers, rather than via Khoi migration (Mitchell, 1996; Sadr,
1998). There are few sites dating to this period, but sheep are directly dated
at Spoegrivier in Namibia c. 2105 BP, and Blombos Cave in the southern
Cape c. 2000 BP (Henshilwood, 1996; Sealy and Yates, 1994, 1996) (Fig. 2).
Faunal evidence from other sites, previously thought to indicate early herding, may in fact be more recent. Pastoral sites occur at low densities, and
show a generalized subsistence based on sheep herding and variable use of
wild animals and plants.
Early Iron Age groups in southern Africa after 2000 BP lived in fairly
permanent settlements and relied on livestock, especially sheep and goats,
and African grains and pulses (Maggs, 1984). Cattle became more numerous
after c. 1500 BP, but fish, molluscs, tortoises, and wild mammals continued
to be important (Plug and Voigt, 1985; Voigt, 1987). Mixed farming was not
continuously distributed across far southern Africa as it was just south of
the equator. Because of livestock diseases, winter rainfall, and desert areas,
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farming was confined to the eastern half of South Africa. Away from the continental 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 regions lacked a critical mass of potential domesticates, and that domestic
plants spread south slowly because of Africa’s north–south 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 resultant 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 regions 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 archaeological record from early periods (Deacon 1984a,b). Holocene huntergatherers 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?
As during the initial domestication of cattle, concerns about predictable
access to animal products would have shaped decisions to adopt livestock,
or to move them to new locales. The relative predictability of herding versus
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hunting and gathering varied from place to place, however, depending on
local food resources, terrain, diseases, and social settings.
African cattle were well-adapted to the grasslands of north Africa that
constituted the original wild range of Bos primigenius: wetter parts of the
Sahara and northern Sudan. There, pastoralism spread quickly because cattle
allowed hunter-gatherers to use a broad range of vegetation types, intensifying subsistence while exploiting localized environmental instability. Herding was more sustainable than sedentary hunting and gathering in an arid
landscape with unpredictable resources, and social relations among huntergatherer groups were well established. Trading networks between the Sahara
and the Sudanese Nile had long existed, and in the Sudan cattle had access to
a dependable water source. In contrast, herders moving into eastern Africa
had no previous relations with local hunter-gatherers, and limited access to
other herders, breeding stock, and social safety networks. Eastern Africa
also lies outside the wild range of cattle, and wildlife diseases made livestock a less predictable source of food. In part because of these diseases,
pastoralism was not widespread farther south until it was integrated with
crop cultivation.
Pastoralists tend to cope with climatic variability by exploiting spatial
heterogeneity, rather than by modifying the landscape. Early herders thus
affected hunter-gatherer resources less than settled agriculturalists would
have done, and extensive, shifting land use allowed pastoralists and huntergatherers to coexist, contributing to the continuation of hunting and gathering. Furthermore, in many areas, herding offered no particular advantages
over existing strategies of hunting and gathering, but would have required
much more labor. Despite environmental deterioration in the Sahara, hunting and gathering persisted for millennia after stock became widely distributed. The Sudanese Nile offered reliable access to plants and fish without investing in herding. The abundance of game in East Africa would have
offered higher returns from hunting than herding. In eastern and southern
Africa, the sustained commitment of time and labor required by herding
would not have fit well with preexisting immediate-return hunting and gathering strategies supported by the region’s comparatively predictable nuts,
fruits, tubers, and game. In Africa, hunting and gathering continued both
as an independent strategy and as a component of generalized pastoralism.
This pattern contrasts with the spread of farming in many other regions of
the world.
Despite the success of herding as the earliest form of food production in
Africa, several characteristics of herding (as compared with agriculture) contributed to the uneven spread of food production, and ensured the continuation of hunting and gathering groups. Pastoralists are mobile, with relatively
low population densities. They are quite specialized, depending mainly on
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three domestic species. In addition, the continous labor of herding presents
more scheduling conflicts than farming does for hunter-gatherers adopting food production: domestic plants can be more easily left than animals
(Marshall, 2000). The form of the earliest food production in Africa, pastoralism, and the spatial variation in relative predictability of hunting and
gathering versus food production, both contributed to the patchy spread of
food production so distinctive of Africa.
DOMESTICATION OF PLANTS: WHY SO LATE?
In most regions of the world, plants were domesticated before animals.
In Africa, plants were domesticated long after herding was first established.
Delays in domestication of African plants are due to a number of factors,
many of which relate to scheduled consumption, predictability, and the mobile nature of early pastoral societies. We discuss general reasons for the
late domestication of plants; reasons for domestication of particular plant
species are beyond the scope of this paper.
The first domestic plants in Africa were southwest Asian crops c. 7000 BP,
which were confined to the Nile Valley by their need for winter rain
(Wetterstrom, 1993). Indigenous African crops can be grouped into three
complexes (Table I): savanna, forest margin, and Ethiopian (Harlan 1982,
1992b). On the basis of the geographic distribution of wild progenitors of
African crops, Harlan (1971) argues that in Africa, unlike many other regions of the world, domestication of plants was noncentric: crops did not
spread from a single geographic point of origin (Fig. 3). Rather, domestication occurred under a variety of conditions in widely dispersed regions of
Africa.
The first indigenous domestic grains appear after early movement of
Saharan groups into the west African grasslands c. 4000–3500 BP (Smith
1980, 1984) (Fig. 4). Domestic pearl millet is found as impressions in sherds
at Dhars Tichitt and Oualata in Mauritania from c. 3500 BP (Amblard, 1996;
Amblard and Pernès, 1989). Charred grains of domestic pearl millet are directly dated to c. 3460 BP at Birimi in northern Ghana (D’Andrea et al.,
2001), c. 2840 BP at Ti-n-Akof in northern Burkina Faso, and c. 2930 BP
at Gajiganna and c. 2430 BP at Kursakata in the Chad basin of northeast
Nigeria (Neumann et al., 1996). Recent studies have resolved the longstanding question of whether pearl millet was domesticated by hunter-gatherers,
early mobile herders, or later, more sedentary herders (Clark, 1976; Shaw,
1977). It now appears that domestication took place among semisedentary
herders in west African savannas, well after the first appearance of pastoralists (D’Andrea et al., 2001; Holl, 1985; Neumann, 1999). Domestic pearl
Latin
name
Cola acuminata Schott et Endl.
Cola nitida (Vent.) Schott et Endl.
Fruit, leaves, seeds
Cereal
Seeds: stimulant
(Robusta coffee)
Fruits: edible
Fruits: caffeine
Tropical west Africa
Highlands, Guinea
Lowland forests, west Africa
to Uganda
West Africa, forests
West Africa, forests
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Cola
Crops of the Forest Margin Complex
Okra
Abelmoschus esculentus (L.)
Guinea millet
Brachiaria deflexa (Schum.) Hubb.
Robusta coffee
Coffea canephora Pierre
Highlands, Guinea
Dry lowland savanna,
south and east Africa
Widespread in lowlands
Senegal to Lake Chad
Savanna, Togo to Nigeria
West Africa
Savanna
Widely used
Savanna, far west Africa
Dry savanna,
Sudan to Senegal
Savanna, Sudan to Chad
Savanna, west Africa
to east Nigeria
Habitat and/or
location
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Cereal
Pulse
Cereal
Fruit, leaves, seed, oil:
water source in deserts
Leaves: pot herb
Cereal
Cereal
Leaves: pot herb, seeds
Leaves, calyces: pot herb
Pericarp: containers
Cereal
Cereal
Edible parts
and uses
Journal of World Prehistory [jowo]
Crops of the Savanna Complex
Guinea millet
Brachiaria deflexa
African watermelon
Citrullus lanatus (Thumb.) Masf.,
Colocynthis citrullus (L.) O. Kuntze
Tossa jute
Corchorus olitorius Linn.
Fonio
Digitaria exilis (Kipp.) Stapf
Black fonio
Digitaria iburua Stapf
Kenaf
Hibiscus cannabinus Linn.
Roselle
Hibiscus sabdariffa Linn.
Bottle gourd
Lagenaria siceraria Standl.
African rice
Oryza glaberrima Steud.
Pearl millet,
Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.,
Bulrush millet
formerly P. americanum
Sorghum
Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench
Bambara
Voandzeia subterranea
groundnut
(L.) Thouars
Vernacular
name
Table I. Selected African Crops, Their Uses and Original Distributionsa
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et al. (1991), FAO (1988), Harlan (1992a), Harlan et al. (1976), Purseglove (1968, 1972), and Zeven and Zhukovsky (1975).
Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia
Mid/highland forest, Ethiopia
Highland Ethiopia, east Africa
Mid/highland forest, Ethiopia
Semiarid mid/highland Ethiopia
Low/midland Ethiopia, east Africa
West and north Ethiopia highlands
Midlands, west Ethiopia
West Africa
Forest margin, west Africa
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a Engels
Leaves: stimulant
Seeds, leaves: stimulant
Cereal
Corm, pseudostem starch
Cereal
Tuber
Oil seed
Wild fruits, domestic tubers
Fruit; seeds: oil
Pulse, pot herb
Forest, west Africa
Midlands and highlands,
Ethiopia, east and south Africa
Southern Sahel, east/south Africa
Forest margins, west Africa
Savanna, west Africa to
east Nigeria
Savanna, east Africa
West Africa
West Africa
Habitat and/or
location
124
Crops of the Ethiopian/East African Highlands Complex
Chat
Catha edulis Forsk.
Coffee
Coffea arabica Linn.
Finger millet
Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertner
Enset
Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman
Tef
Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter
Yam
Dioscorea cayenensis Lam. complex
Noog
Guizotia abyssinica Cass.
Anchote
Coccinia abyssinica (W. & A.) Cogn.
Fluted gourd
Cowpea
Legume: seeds, tubers
Pulse
Tuber
Tuber
Subterranean and
aerial tubers
Tuber
Fruit: oil; male flowers: wine
Pulse
Edible parts
and uses
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Yam pea
Dioscorea cayenensis Lam. complex
Elaeis guineensis Jacq.
Kerstingiella geocarpa Harms
Yam
Oil palm
Kersting’s
groundnut
Hyacinth bean
Hausa potato
Piasa
Lablab niger Medik.
Plectranthus esculentus N. E. Br.
Solenostemon rotundifolius
(Poir.) J.K. Morton
Sphenostylis stenocarpa
(Hochst.) Harms
Telfairia occidentalis Hook. f.
Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.
Dioscorea bulbifera L.
Latin
name
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Air potato
Vernacular
name
Table I. (Continued )
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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 Jenné 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 Jenné Jenno (McIntosh, 1995, 1997).
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Fig. 4. Distribution of sites with early cultivated or domestic plants.
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. 7950–8020 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 frequency 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 Jenné Jenno
(McIntosh, 1995) and 20–250 AD at the historic sites of Meroë, 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 domestic 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 excavations 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 (D’Andrea et al., 1999) and of differences
between wild and domestic enset (Hildebrand, 2001) will facilitate future archaeological 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 domestic 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 resources 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 appear 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?
Many African cereals are amenable to domestication because of their
appealing taste, rapid growth, high yields, drought tolerance, good storage
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potential, and single-locus genetic inheritance of key traits (Diamond, 1997;
Harlan, 1992a). The absence of evidence for early domestic plants has been
attributed to several causes. Young and Thompson (1999) argue that poor
preservation of seeds and cereals in tropical east Africa results from rapid
carbon cycling, wetting and drying cycles, and a high level of soil microbial
activity, and contributes to a lack of evidence for early crops. Insufficient
archaeobotanical research is also an issue (Bar-Yosef, 1998; Wetterstrom,
1998). Poor preservation and lack of research do not completely account
for the absence of morphologically domestic plant remains before 4000 BP,
however. A growing body of paleoethnobotanical data from northern Africa
attests to the use of wild grasses and other plants by hunter-gatherers and
early herders (Abdel-Magid, 1989; Magid and Caneva, 1998; Stemler, 1990;
Wasylikowa, 1993; Wasylikowa et al., 1993, 1997). Possible reasons for the
late onset of morphological change among African crops include harvesting
practices, plant biology (Abdel-Magid, 1989; Haaland, 1992), the unpredictable plant productivity of the Sahara and its margins, and the mobility
of early herders.
Uprooting plants or cutting seed heads with sickles can select for indehiscence, synchronous ripening, and loss of dormancy. Not all harvesting methods result in domestication, however (Harlan, 1992a). Tuareg and
Zaghawa pastoralists today collect Panicum, Cenchrus, and other wild
African grains by hand-stripping, by using a swinging basket, or by beating (Harlan, 1989, 1992c; Nicolaisen, 1963). These methods select for brittle
rachises, and hence will not result in domestication. Evidence for prehistoric
selection processes is mixed. Blades or flakes with gloss, possible indicators of sickle harvesting, are absent at Zakiab, Kadero 1, and Um Direiwa
(Haaland, 1992), but appear during the mid-Holocene at Dakhleh
(McDonald, 1998a), Adrar Bous III (Roset, 1987), and Farafra (Barich,
1998), and at Laga Oda in Ethiopia during the last 3000 years (Clark and
Prince, 1978). More detailed microwear studies are needed to identify the
precise cause of the gloss (e.g., grain cutting or hide preparation); if, however, these pieces are indeed found to be sickles, they might be indicative of
harvesting practices that could have led to domestication.
Even if harvesting methods favor tough rachises, grains must be replanted and genetically isolated for selection to result in morphological
change (Harlan, 1989, 1992c; Hillman and Davies, 1990). Late domestication
of sorghum and pearl millet has been attributed to their ability to outcross,
which can impede genetic isolation. According to this view, domestication of
sorghum became possible only when early Sudanese pastoralists took it outside its natural range (Abdel-Magid, 1989; Haaland, 1992, 1995). Outcrossing rates vary among African cereals, however (National Research Council,
1996): finger millet is almost entirely self-pollinating, sorghum has highly
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variable rates of outcrossing, and pearl millet outcrosses the most but appears 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 interactions between people and plants that would not have led to domestication. 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 animals 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. Areas 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 emphasizing 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 useful 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 continent’s
noncentric pattern of domestication.
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DISCUSSION
African patterns of early food production contrast with those in other
parts of the globe in interesting ways. In Africa, domestic animals were
present several thousand years before domestic plants, and the earliest food
producers were mobile cattle herders. In other regions of the world, plants
were domesticated first, animals were domesticated later, among settled,
village-based communities (Grigson, 2000; Smith, 1998; see also Hole, 1996),
and nomadic pastoralism emerged still later, as a specialized strategy complementing settled agriculture (Bar-Yosef and Khazanov, 1992). African cattle
and some African cereals were domesticated in high-risk arid and semiarid
environments, settings not consistent with current emphases on domestication in relatively resource-rich environments (Harris, 1996a; Price and
Gebauer, 1995; Smith, 1998).
The desire to schedule consumption of resources can lead people to
manipulate plants and animals, and may have prompted domestication of
African cattle amid low and variable rainfall in the Sahara during the early
Holocene. Herding did not develop in predictably abundant areas such as
the Nile Valley, or in predictably harsh environments such as the late Pleistocene Sahara. Rather, it developed in marginal environments where predictable access to resources was important, and where mobile animals were
less vulnerable than plants to localized, short-term droughts. Prerequisites
for labor investment in herding included delayed-return strategies of hunting
and gathering, and concepts of ownership.
As pastoralism spread across the Sahara and subsequent desiccation
prompted herders to move south, adoption of food production was patchy
despite the overall success of herding. This is largely due to spatial variation
in the relative predictability of herding versus hunting and gathering. Difficult terrain impeded the spread of stock into some areas; elsewhere, cattle
diseases made pastoralism a risky endeavor. Where herding became established, mobile use of the landscape by small pastoral populations left many
local resources intact. Thus, in areas where wild resources were predictable,
local groups could continue to hunt and gather well after the arrival of domesticates. Herding is more difficult to adopt than cultivation, especially among
immediate-return hunter-gatherers, because of ownership and scheduling issues. All of these factors led to a distinctively African pattern of slow, patchy
spread of food production. Other Old World agricultural complexes often
competed more directly with local hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies, so
that food production was adopted broadly along a rapidly moving frontier.
The development of herding before mixed agriculture started Africans
on a distinctive path of subsistence intensification. Mobility lightened
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selective pressure on local plant populations; harvesting practices and plant
biology may also have delayed morphological change. Prolonged, intensive use of wild plants across the African continent led to a noncentric
pattern of late domestication, and continued use of wild plants by foodproducing societies. In many early farming societies outside Africa, a complex of crops such as cereals, pulses, and livestock often spread as a package
from a point-origin (Harlan, 1971; Harris, 1996b), and the importance of
local wild resources diminished sharply once the suite of domesticates was
established.
Early mobile, animal-intensive food production may have had important consequences for subsequent trajectories of social change in Africa.
Pastoral groups require communal access to distant water sources and pastures and are often associated with social structures such as age sets that
promote wide ranging relationships (Spear, 1993). Many of the traits of
early African herders are also those thought to be important to the development of relatively egalitarian societies over the long term: communal access
to pastures, low population densities, and high mobility (Salzman, 1999 and
CA comment). Although livestock-based inequalities of wealth are known
to exist, they may be more difficult to create and maintain than agriculturally based inequalities (Little, 1999; Salzman, 1999; Schneider, 1979; but see
Fratkin, 1999). Flexible camp groups and the importance of decision making
by individual herd owners also tend to diffuse political authority (McCabe,
1999; Tavakolian, 1999).
Some African patterns, such as the use of small-seeded crops, patchy
adoption of food production, and continuation of hunter-gatherer societies,
resemble those of eastern North America (Fritz, 1990; Smith, 1992b;
Watson, 1989) more than those of western Asia (Bar-Yosef, 1998; Harris,
1996a). Others, such as domestication of animals before plants, may be similar to Andean patterns (Browman, 1989; see also Wheeler, 1984; Wing,
1986). African data also reinforce some commonalities noted for many
loci of domestication. Arid conditions following the end of the Pleistocene
are often thought to have catalyzed subsistence change (Bar-Yosef and
Belfer-Cohen, 1989; Harris, 1996b; McCorriston and Hole, 1991; Moore and
Hillman, 1992; Piperno and Pearsall, 1998). Finally, the African data support Harris’ contention that pristine domestication processes are rare, and
require unusual combinations of biological and cultural circumstances
(Harris, 1996c). We argue that concerns about predictable availability of
resources, rather than increased yield, catalyzed domestication in Africa,
and suggest that renewed attention to predictability may contribute to understanding the circumstances that led to domestication in other regions of
the world.
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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 D’Andrea, 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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