Istwa Nou

The link between inventing agriculture and spreading a language family holds well outside Africa. Andrew Pawley argues that the people who worked out cultivation in interior New Guinea in the eighth and seventh millennia BCE spoke proto-Trans-New Guinea, and that from around 7000 BCE their descendants carried both the crops and the language across much of the island and into neighbouring island chains. Recent work points the same way for the northern and northwestern edges of the Fertile Crescent, where speakers of languages related to the North Caucasian family had a major hand in creating farming in the tenth and ninth millennia BCE. People of that background probably also carried the first agriculture west across southern Europe and on into the interior and the far west over the seventh and early sixth millennia. The pattern is a global regularity. Africa's three independent agricultural traditions and their three language family expansions are the continent taking a full part in it.

Word histories compared across related languages work as a register of the past, and the great African families make the point. Niger-Congo expansion began in the first four thousand years of the Holocene, carried at first by better returns from collecting wild grain and then by the shift into cultivation. Nilo-Saharan expansion began with an elaborate use of aquatic resources and moved on to herding and cultivation, alongside Cushitic-speaking neighbours doing much the same. The third case is Omotic. In far southwestern Ethiopia, Omotic speakers appear to have invented agriculture on their own around the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, and over the following three thousand years they spread enset farming across the southern Ethiopian highlands and up into the north-central highlands as well. Enset is the false banana, a staple that still feeds millions of Ethiopians and that most of the world has never heard of. Three families, three inventions of farming, three demographic expansions, all African.