10,000 to 6000 BCE · Africanspan
Agriculture was invented at least thirteen times, three of them in Africa
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Between 10,000 and 6000 BCE people in many far apart regions worked out cultivation on their own. Three of these centres are African. Fonio was domesticated in West Africa, sorghum out in the eastern Sahara, and enset together with Ethiopian yams in the southwestern highlands of Ethiopia. The Americas account for five. Northern Mexico produced pumpkin, southern Mexico and Central America maize and squash, highland South America the potato, the northern lowlands sweet potatoes, peanuts and American yams, and around 5000 BCE the eastern central United States sunflower and squash. Eurasia adds northern China with foxtail millet, southern China with rice, the hills above the Fertile Crescent with wheat and barley, and possibly three areas of India. Interior New Guinea contributes taro and banana. The textbook version keeps one of these centres and traces everything else to it by diffusion. That account erases twelve inventions. The fonio farmers of West Africa owed Mesopotamia nothing, and neither did the sorghum growers or the enset growers.
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