4000 to 3300 BCE · Africanspan
Wheat reaches the Ethiopian highlands overland from Egypt
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Wheat, barley and chickpeas came to the Horn of Africa from the Levant, and the obvious route looks like the short crossing of the Red Sea from Arabia. The lexical evidence points elsewhere. These crops travelled from Egypt, south along the Red Sea Hills, which stayed marginally farmable in places until around 3300 BCE and closed afterwards. The people who received them were Cushitic speakers in the Ethiopian highlands who had been farming for a long time already, on two indigenous grains of their own, finger millet and teff. They added the newcomers to a system that worked. The plough arrived with the same package and became the main implement across the northern and central highlands. Further south and west, in the Sudan belt and East Africa, warm-season rainfall and different soils stopped the spread. Ecology drew that boundary. Accounts that read the limit as a failure of African farmers have the mechanism backwards.
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