Istwa Nou

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.

Drier conditions in the later seventh and sixth millennia BCE moved the advantage away from the communities living off the Saharan waterways and toward Nilo-Saharan speakers who had built their living on dry land. Through the proto-Northern Sudanic, proto-Saharo-Sahelian and proto-Sahelian periods of the eighth and seventh millennia, those peoples of the southern and eastern Sahara began by protecting cattle and by the close of the seventh millennium were herding cattle outright, along with the sheep and goats that had recently arrived. They had started as collectors of wild grain. By the later eighth millennium the vocabulary they left behind, and the granaries archaeologists find, indicate they were cultivating sorghum and probably pearl millet as well. Nobody here was waiting for the climate to decide. What emerged was an economy pairing herds with grain that would carry across the whole Sahel within two millennia, and the pastoral societies of Sudan and the Fulani of West Africa descend from it.