Istwa Nou

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.

In the early Holocene the tropical African rain belt pushed north to the middle of the Sahara while the Mediterranean winter rains pushed south to meet it, and the desert turned green. Rivers ran off the Tibesti and Hoggar massifs and filled at least two great bodies of fresh water: Lake Fitri, and Lake Mega-Chad, which stretched well over six hundred kilometres from the site of the present Lake Chad north to the Tibesti. Early Nilo-Saharan speakers moved west out of the Nile country along these new waterways, and by the ninth millennium BCE they were working the shores of Mega-Chad with an intensive foraging economy built on large fish such as Nile perch and on hunting hippopotamus. The archaeologist J. E. G. Sutton named this the Aquatic Civilization of Middle Africa. It fed communities across a continental span for thousands of years, then vanished under the sand, leaving harpoon points, fish bones and the languages of the people who built it.