Istwa Nou

Traffic ran into Africa as well. Sheep and goats came south out of the Levant to northeastern Africa as early as the seventh millennium BCE, along with more cattle, and those two animals did eventually spread across most of the continent. The crops did much less. By the seventh and sixth millennia, barley and early wheats were growing along the Mediterranean fringe, where winter rain suited them, and in irrigated pockets of Egypt such as the Fayum. Sometime before the Sahara finished drying, probably in the fourth millennium, wheat, barley and chickpeas passed southeast into the highlands of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, where cool-season rains gave them conditions close to Mediterranean ones. That is the whole list, and it stops at the coast, the Nile corridor and the highlands. Eurasian crops never reworked the farming of the African interior the way African crops reworked farming in South Asia. The exchange was real and the balance sat on Africa's side.