# Are the after effects of colonialism to blame for most African countries current problems? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 14, 2010, 5:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456 "2010-03-14T17:41:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/41 "2010-03-15T16:29:52Z")
> [@Rune](#): > > The problems besetting Africa is due to decisions made by Africans and predominantly hinges on defective culture. I see. You prevent a kid from going to school, not allow him to make any of his own decisions, not allow him access to the outside world, and then at 18 you turn him loose. When he goes unemployed and homeless, and is taken advantage of by almost everyone, you say the problem is his poor decisions. Right. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/42 "2010-03-15T20:39:36Z")
I do have to wonder if, on average, they would have been any better without colonization, THe Belgian Congo and a few similar nasienesses notwithstanding. As a whole, few states lasted terribly long even in northern Africa (mabe Egypt is sucking up all the stability). The alternative to today’s brutal thugocracies might be smaller, equaly brutal thugocracies. ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/43 "2010-03-15T21:22:00Z")
> [@Mr.Excellent](#): > > King Leopold ruled it as his personal rubber-factory and outlet for the inferiority complex that being a constituional monarch gave him. Being a constitutional monarch gave him an inferiority complex? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/44 "2010-03-15T21:23:34Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#): > > Being a constitutional monarch gave him an inferiority complex? Wouldn’t it give you one, if you had to share the neighborhood with the Pope, the Tsar and the Sultan? ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/45 "2010-03-15T21:35:48Z")
> [@](#): > > BrainGlutton > Guest Join Date: Mar 2003 > > Quote: > Originally Posted by Chen019 > I probably should have worded that differently. I meant that the disparities you see may be in part due to the fact that different groups had to handle different selection pressures. > > . . . OK, you must mean something entirely different from what I’m hearing, because what you seem to be saying sounds exactly like the long-since-discredited bullshit from the article on “Negro” in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. What exactly has been discredited though? As Hsu points out here: > [@](#): > > What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster – we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution. > > In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (“races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance). [Information Processing: "No scientific basis for race"](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html) University of Virginia Psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made a similar observation in light of recent studies showing accelerated genetic changes over the past 10,000 years. > [@](#): > > A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. > > But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide “races”) adapted to local circumstances by a process known as “co-evolution” in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole “races” but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle. > > Recent “sweeps” of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. > > The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event. (By “ethnic” I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.) > > I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017. [http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09\_4.html#haidt](http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_4.html#haidt) ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/46 "2010-03-15T21:35:49Z")
Would have thought meglomania a more likely candidate. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/47 "2010-03-15T22:06:57Z")
> [@penultima\_thule](#): > > Would have thought meglomania a more likely candidate. The one often produces the other. Viz. Napoleon (who actually was of average height for his time and place, but spent his whole life overcompensating for a sense of **social** inferiority to his high-born classmates at the military academy he attended on scholarship). ---
**Author:** ![penultima\_thule](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penultima_thule/32/3833_2.png) [@penultima\_thule](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/penultima_thule)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/48 "2010-03-15T22:33:25Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > The one often produces the other. Viz. Napoleon (who actually was of average height for his time and place, but spent his whole life overcompensating for a sense of **social** inferiority to his high-born classmates at the military academy he attended on scholarship). True, but are you suggesting that King Leopold of Belgium had a sense of social inferiority? Keeping up with the Jones’s maybe. I was actually more interested the point by **Mr. Excellent** that this complex, whatever it’s character, was caused by Leopold being a constitutional monarch. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/49 "2010-03-15T23:04:33Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Yes and, as your own reference says, it then spread into Africa. All the evidence I’ve seen says that it spread into Africa before spreading into Europe, which makes sense given that it’s climatically identical and accessible via a direct land route rather than the circuitous land or sea route into Europe. > > But let’s not quibble. Even according to your own reference, at the very least Africans have been practising agriculture at least as long as Europeans. So once again I ask: In light of this fact, how does the theory you posted above explain anything? The recent acceleration paper suggests it arose 10,000 years ago though, and there is no evidence of agriculture in sub-saharan africa until at least 4,000 years ago. The advantage of this is something that Jared Diamond discusses here: > [@](#): > > Within less than 2000 years of the beginnings of domestication in the crescent, its results had been carried east and west to launch the origins of food production over a huge swath of Eurasia (see the figure), from Pakistan to the Balkans (3). Food production’s expansion over the Americas, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent was much slower because of the north-south axes of those landmasses (4). In short, einkorn domestication in the Karacada mountains exemplifies the enormous head start that western Eurasian societies gained from Fertile Crescent biogeography. > > For history’s broad patterns, as for real estate investment, location is almost everything. Plant and animal domestication was prerequisite to the growth of large, dense, sedentary human populations, in which the food-producing activities of part of the population yielded storable food surpluses to feed non-food-producing parts of the population. Hence, food production triggered the emergence of kings, bureaucrats, scribes, professional soldiers, and metal-workers and other full-time craftspeople (4). Literacy, metallurgy, stratified societies, advanced weapons, and empires rested on food production. In addition, smallpox and the other crowd epidemic diseases of Eurasia could evolve only in those dense, sedentary human populations living in close contact with domesticated animals, whose own pathogens evolved into those specialized pathogens afflicting us (4). [http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/orig\_agri\_tur.html](http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/orig_agri_tur.html) As Cochran notes above, those changes to a more complex, denser population lead to genetic changes. > [@](#): > > GC: It increased human density by tens of times, which made a big difference in disease risks. It radically changed diet, and it dramatically furthered hierarchy and social complexity. > > 2B: You and Henry assert that populations that adopted agriculture were much influenced by the development, and in non-insignificant, deep-in-the-biochemistry sorts of ways. What would your favorite examples of those adaptations be? > > GC: Metabolic/diet changes like lactose tolerance, many changes in genes involved with defense against infectious disease, many changes in genes that affect hearing and smell, changes in neurotransmitters and related genes that most likely influence personality, changes in genes involved with the regulation of nerve connections and brain growth. This point was also made recently in the New York Times. > [@](#): > > A third group of selected genes affects brain function. The role of these genes is unknown, but they could have changed in response to the social transition as people moved from small hunter-gatherer groups a hundred strong to villages and towns inhabited by several thousand, Dr. Laland said. “It’s highly plausible that some of these changes are a response to aggregation, to living in larger communities,” he said. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html?pagewanted=2](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html?pagewanted=2) ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2010, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/50 "2010-03-15T23:39:14Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > The recent acceleration paper suggests it arose 10,000 years ago though, and there is no evidence of agriculture in sub-saharan africa until at least 4,000 years ago. But I think the point **Blake** is making is that agriculture reached Africa **BEFORE** it reached Western Europe. (Yes, agriculture did originally arise in western Asia long before it reached either of those other regions.) So even if agriculture **does** exert evolutionary selection pressures on human populations, those selection pressures have been operating on Africans at least as long as on Western Europeans. So the “evolutionary selection pressures due to agriculture” theory can’t explain differences in economic development between Africans and Western Europeans. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/51 "2010-03-16T00:21:48Z")
What Kimstu said. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/52 "2010-03-16T02:15:43Z")
> [@](#): > > Kimstu wrote, > > But I think the point Blake is making is that agriculture reached Africa BEFORE it reached Western Europe. (Yes, agriculture did originally arise in western Asia long before it reached either of those other regions.) > > So even if agriculture does exert evolutionary selection pressures on human populations, those selection pressures have been operating on Africans at least as long as on Western Europeans. But it was clearly qualitatively different according to Jared Diamond, and allowed more complex hierarchical structures to emerge. > [@](#): > > The switch from being hunter-gatherer to agrarian also brought animal domestication with it. Or, the “lucky” nations were also bestowed with the animal types that were suitable for domestication, unlike Africa, where the animals were fierce, or America, where native animals were small animals. Thus, Eurasian people were able to domesticate these animals, that helped them in many ways: farming, food, clothing and military power. Being in the same latitude, Europe was able to bring the same animals over to the continent without any problems, and take advantage of them. > > Having mastered agriculture and domesticating animals, Eurasians had time to develop in other areas, like government organization, statehood, reading and writing and military organization. Increased population density also brought about another advantage that prepared the Europeans for their military advancements to different continents. The lack of isolation of any one nation in that part of the world led to many wars and these wars also had an impact on the development of military systems and weapons. Invention of the steel could be considered a result of agriculture and close contact with other nations, as agriculture gave the people to chance to think about new things and not worry about food, while close contact with other nations gave them inspiration, as well as fear, which led to invention of many weapons. > > Finally, Diamond puts forward that living closely with animals and other people also helped the Eurasians build an immune system stronger than those of Africa and America. Close contact with pigs, sheep, goat and horses made the humans less prone to get sick from the the dormant germs they carried with them. [http://akcaoglu.fts.educ.msu.edu/?p=234](http://akcaoglu.fts.educ.msu.edu/?p=234) As Voight notes here: > [@](#): > > A number of recent studies have detected more signals of adaptation in non-African populations than in Africans [13–17], and some of those studies have conjectured that non-Africans might have experienced greater pressures to adapt to new environments than Africans have… > > Recent articles have proposed that genes involved in brain development and function may have been important targets of selection in recent human evolution [8,9]. While we do not find evidence for selection in the two genes reported in those studies (MCPH1 and ASPM), we do find signals in two other microcephaly genes, namely, CDK5RAP2 in Yoruba, and CENPJ in Europeans and East Asians [46]. Though there is not an overall enrichment for neurological genes in our gene ontology analysis, several other important brain genes also have signals of selection, including the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter GABRA4, an Alzheimer’s susceptibility gene PSEN1, and SYT1 in Yoruba; the serotonin transporter SLC6A4 in Europeans and East Asians; and the dystrophin binding gene SNTG1 in all populations. > **[PLOS Biology](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/)** ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/53 "2010-03-16T03:19:49Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > But it was clearly qualitatively different according to Jared Diamond, and allowed more complex hierarchical structures to emerge. This claim is a little confusing because what you quoted is actually a blog post **about** Diamond’s book _Guns, Germs and Steel_, by an educational psychology grad student named Mete Akcaoglu. I can’t tell how closely his remarks track what Diamond’s book actually says, nor whether you’re inadvertently mistaking this for a summary by Diamond himself or making an implied claim about Akcaoglu’s accuracy in interpreting Diamond’s ideas. The summary you quote seems to range all over the map chronologically, jumping from the period of the introduction of agriculture to European imperialism in early modern times. I don’t think it really makes a coherent argument for different evolutionary selection pressures due to differences in early agricultural practice in Africa versus western Europe. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/54 "2010-03-16T05:01:55Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > This claim is a little confusing because what you quoted is actually a blog post **about** Diamond’s book _Guns, Germs and Steel_, by an educational psychology grad student named Mete Akcaoglu. I can’t tell how closely his remarks track what Diamond’s book actually says, nor whether you’re inadvertently mistaking this for a summary by Diamond himself or making an implied claim about Akcaoglu’s accuracy in interpreting Diamond’s ideas. > > The summary you quote seems to range all over the map chronologically, jumping from the period of the introduction of agriculture to European imperialism in early modern times. I don’t think it really makes a coherent argument for different evolutionary selection pressures due to differences in early agricultural practice in Africa versus western Europe. I don’t have a copy of GGS in front of me, but that seems an accurate account of Diamond’s position. Geographic advantages and availability of domesticable plants and animals allowed some societies to have greater food production, leading to population increases, greater population density (leading to more complex governance systems, states and formalized laws), and specialization (allowing technology to develop, writing etc) as there were food surpluses. Bill Gates comments on this in his review: > [@](#): > > In Europe and Asia, food surpluses allowed some people to specialize in science or art and others to focus their energies on being soldiers. Civilizations grew in the Fertile Crescent and spread to the east and west. [http://www.edge.org/discourse/diamond\_evolution.html](http://www.edge.org/discourse/diamond_evolution.html) Also, there is increasing evidence of adaptive change due to new environments. > [@](#): > > Here we have presented a comprehensive scan for selective sweeps across the human genome. Several general patterns emerge from the analysis. We find much more evidence for selective sweeps in Chinese and European-American populations than in the African-American population. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that, as anatomically modern humans migrated out of sub-Saharan Africa, the novel environments they encountered imposed new selective pressures, which in turn led to an increased rate of population-specific selective sweeps [54–56]. > > However, a caveat should be considered when interpreting the differences between African-American and non-African populations: the statistical power to detect selective sweeps is likely to be much lower in the African-American sample. Because the CLR test is based on a complete sweep model, the recent admixture of African and European lineages in the African-American population probably weakens the signal of Africa-specific selective sweeps. If a complete selective sweep occurred in African populations after the divergence of European populations, then the beneficial allele, and corresponding haplotypes, would not be fixed in the African-American sample. In other words, admixture is expected to fundamentally alter the molecular signature of a selective sweep, and it is therefore unsurprising that our results for the African-American sample are distinctly different from those of the European-American and Chinese samples. > **[PLOS Genetics](https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/)** ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/55 "2010-03-16T06:28:45Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > As a whole, few states lasted terribly long even in northern Africa (mabe Egypt is sucking up all the stability). …and those were all European colonies too. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 6:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/56 "2010-03-16T06:31:31Z")
**Chen** , I really can’t follow your argument any more. It’s not helped by your technique of quoting from web pages that agree with you, rather than stating your own actual position. The result is incoherent and confusing. What precisely are you arguing? That African didn’t develop agriculture simultaneously with western Europeans? That there was some qualitative difference between African agriculture and that of Europeans? Something else altogether? What you have posted so far is largely based on misconceptions and as such not really likely to produce a correct conclusion. Africans didn’t develop agriculture later than Europeans, so I’m still at a loss as to why you think they skipped the evolutionary changes that are supposedly associated with agriculture. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 6:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/57 "2010-03-16T06:46:28Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > (Yes, agriculture did originally arise in western Asia long before it reached either of those other regions.) Actually, I think it’s nowadays generally accepted that agriculture didn’t “reach” Sub-Saharan Africa, but was, in fact, independently developed there. Not once, but three times. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/58 "2010-03-16T06:55:03Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Actually, I think it’s nowadays generally accepted that agriculture didn’t “reach” Sub-Saharan Africa, but was, in fact, independently developed there. Not once, but three times. It’s still a matter of debate, and one that’s not likely to be resolved any time soon. The competing theory is that sub-Saharan’s initially adopted northern agricultural products that were unsuited to their locale, and then using that as a template they went on to domesticate native crops, eventually discarding the northern plants. We know that domestic animals were physically moved into the southern regions. The problem is that no matter which theory is correct, the evidence that remains will look exactly the same. So short of finding wheat or barley in a sub-Saharan location prior to about 2, 00 years ago, the issue won’t be resolved. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 7:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/59 "2010-03-16T07:45:35Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > The problem is that no matter which theory is correct, the evidence that remains will look exactly the same. Agreed. Although if earlier sites continue to show only the sorghum/pearl millet assemblage without any evidence for einkhorn or barley, or any other trade evidence, I think Occam’s Razor lets us safely declare it for independent domestication. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2010, 8:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456/60 "2010-03-16T08:00:53Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Agreed. Although if earlier sites continue to show only the sorghum/pearl millet assemblage without any evidence for einkhorn or barley, or any other trade evidence, I think Occam’s Razor lets us safely declare it for independent domestication. I don’t think it’s that simple. The problem is that only a small number of groups in the north of the region, say in Somalia, would have adopted the Eurasian crops, and then domesticated African crops using that base. The African crops would then have spread south on their own. So unless we’re lucky enough that the very earliest “trans-Saharan” sites were preserved, we wouldn’t really expect to see any Eurasian crops in the earliest site sin most areas, because in most areas the earliest sites wouldn’t have had an Eurasian crops. This is all complicated because we can have fairly good evidence that trade \*was \*going on across the Gulf of Aden/Red sea thousands of years ago, so Eurasian crops probably did make it to sub\_Saharan before agriculture was established there. So we might expect tot find evidence of them in Somalia in the earliest sites even if they were never actually grown there. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-the-after-effects-of-colonialism-to-blame-for-most-african-countries-current-problems/532456.md?page=4)