Istwa Nou

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.

Domestication of animals followed the same scattered pattern as cultivation. Pigs came under human care in Anatolia, sheep, goats and cattle in the hill country curving around the Euphrates and the Tigris. India domesticated cattle separately and early. Llamas were taken in highland South America, pigs again in China, water buffalo somewhat later in southern Asia. In Africa, donkeys were domesticated in the country along the Red Sea Hills, and Nilo-Saharan speakers in the eastern Sahara were protecting cattle and taking the first steps toward domesticating them by the eighth millennium BCE. That places African cattle keeping alongside the earliest sheep and goat herding in the Fertile Crescent, and possibly ahead of it. The donkey, whose labour carried the trade of the ancient world, is African. So is the founding stock of the herds that would shape religion, politics and inheritance across half the continent for the next ten thousand years, first brought under care in the eastern Sahara.