3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
At the margins foragers took up herding on their own terms
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Farming reached the far north and the far south late, because the environments there resisted it. That delay changed the outcome. Immigrant farmers were turned aside from country their crops could not handle, which left the people already living there time to work out which parts of food production suited them and to fold those parts into economies that had been entirely foraging. The Uralic speakers of the European boreal forest and the Khoe peoples of southern Africa are the clearest cases. Two processes are running here. In one, farming populations carrying a complete package move in and absorb or displace the foragers ahead of them, which is the Bantu pattern. In the other, foragers stay where they are and take on livestock or a crop while keeping the base of their old economy. The margins of the agricultural world are where the second process had room to happen, and it produced mixed subsistence systems that belong to neither category.
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