But then we’d expect to find domestication of local crops start at the Red Sea and move eastwards, no? But that’s not, in fact, the pattern so far.
But there’s a lot of work still to be done in the region, so I agree there is a case for imitation, even if it’s not the interpretation I favour. For a parallel case, see the independent, way-earlier-than-Europe development of iron smelting in West Africa.
Not necessarily. One problem is that we don’t know where the jump across the Sahara occurred. The Red Sea seems like a logical site, but it may have moved across in other places as well. Remember that 6, 000 years ago large parts of what is now the Sahara were savanna grassland more akin to modern Israel than to the Sahara of today. So crops could have crossed almost anywhere.
The second problem, which also means we mightn’t expect a north-south migration pattern, is that the temperate Eurasian crops wouldn’t support huge, permanent towns oustide of river plains, and so wouldn’t leave a lot of evidence Similarly the tropical crops like sorghum wouldn’t reach their full potential until into the wetter zones farther south. So we might well see an apparent pattern of agriculture springing up at points remote from the Sahara despite it having been imported from there.
We see a similar thing in North America, with the earliest sites being found in Central America and then a sudden blossoming in the Eastern united States. Yet we can be fairly certain that these weren’t independent developments, rather that the nature of the Central American crops meant that they spread up the river valleys, leaving little trace until they reached the productive and fertile lands in the North east, where they were able to re-achiev full potential and be combined with other native species.
Like I said, the evidence for imitation is pretty much exactly what we’d expect to see if it was autochthonous. It would be interesting if it was genuinely autochthonous, since that would mean that after 200, 000 years every major landmass independently developed agriculture within a few thousand years of each other.
Eh?
The regime in Morocco dates back to the 16th century, of course the Algerians had their old Ottoman rulers booted by the French back in the early 1800s, so hard to say anything there, but for both the Tunisians and the Algerians they had centuries long rule by Ottoman beys. Hard to see how one can say states did not last terribly long in North Africa, quite the contrary really.
Otherwise, I’d rather opine that “organically” developed states from largely local developments - multi-ethnic or not - tend to be a damn sight more stable than the post-colonial states that willy-nilly lumped folks with no proper common history together.
…except Australia, of course, but then I don’t know about their native grasses’ suitability for domestication.
Sorghum and pearl millet were easy pickings, though, - it’s certain that there was already the same pre-domestication phase of regular utilization of wild grains in the Sahel as in the Natufian. To jump from that to domestication, suits me better than an intermediate phase of trying to grow Fertile Crescent crops and failing. Especially since the FC plant suite actually would have grown just fine in the Sudan and Horn areas where they would have likely first arrived, as this was still the tail of the last Wet Phase. Whereas the seeds were already sown, as it were, for local domestication as evidenced by the finds at Nabta Playa.
That, plus, you know, there was that definitely completely separate domestication of the palm-cowpea-groundnut-kola-okra assemblage in West Africa which had squat to do with the FC, either in crop choices (note the lack of significant grains), timing (9000-6000 BCE), or methodology (this was forest cropping rather than the dryland or valley agriculture of both the Crescent and the Horn/Sahel). So regardless of the originality of the sorghum-millet area, Africa definitely did develop agriculture independently.
Later and qualitatively different because of the different domesticable plants and animals. Diamond explains:
Diamond’s seems to have changed his tune on when Africa had agriculture - it clearly wasn’t thousands of years after Europe, that at least is for damn sure. Check his 2002 Nature article. Or at least, he acknowledged the 9000 BCE W African developments there.
I thought that had always been a key part of Diamond’s explanation in GGS? That not only was it earlier, but the availability of domesticable plants and animals allowed more intensive methods which lead to food surpluses. That allowed specialization, invention etc.
I’ll have to read it again sometime.
The Australian *landmass *was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, site of agriculture. It just happened to be invented in New Guinea rather than on whatis now the main island.
As for the suitability of native plants for domestication, well both rice and bananas are available along with dozens of sorghum, teff and millet species.
All true, but unfortunately not adequate to settle the debate.
Depends how you mean “independently”. There are plenty of examples in the world where people have productive agricultural systems that don’t utilise the initial domesticates (wheat, rice, quinoa, banana, maize and maybe millet) to any great degree. But I’m not aware of anybody suggesting that as evidence that they developed independently. Rather it seems to be a case of those crops being better adapted than the imported plants, and so replacing them oin the agricultural system. But agriculture itself spread from areas that establishe dusing the traditional crops.
I don’t know if you read it, but Diamond doesn’t say anything of the sort in the passage that you quoted. He neither mentions when agriculture entered Africa, nor what type it was when it arrived.
Once again, you are confusing your readers and, I suspect, yourself, by quoting webapges that you think agree with you, rather than simply stating what you believe in your own words.
Honestly, this reminds me of our debates with the pro-hemp loonies. Rather than presenting any coherent argument of their own, they just paste webapage after webpage, and every time a point is rebutted they ignore the rebuttal and simply paste another quote from another webpage.
That really doesn’t make for a coherent or enjoyable debate.
What you have stated in your own words is provably not true. Agriculture did not enter Africa later than Europe, and it was not qualitatively different when it did so. SO your argument is based on provable falsehoods and can therefore be dismissed.
When you are looking for excuses to explain incompetence and underachievement, and your underlying paradigm is that every population is fundamentally equally enabled, colonialism seems as good an excuse as any to advance…
The overall performance of Africa as a continent comptetitive on the world stage by any number of measures wasn’t particularly impressive at any point in history, pre- or post colonialism. Its current performance is not very reassuring. It seems likely to remain a collection of mostly dependent and under-achieving nations for the forseeable future.
The attribution of this underperformance to innate ability/competence versus external factors depends on whether you buy into Jared Diamond’s or Arthur Jensen’s explanations for why populations are different at a group level.
Should Africa’s failures persist and even worsen despite internal and outside efforts to correct them, it will be interesting to see how long the “post-colonial” excuse can be milked. For those convinced that any disparity among populations must be from something other than innate differences and abilities, I suspect the “outsiders screwing Africa” excuse will be the primary reason advanced for some time.
I hope you are joking.
Just in case you are serious, it may surprise you to know that Egypt was *the * global superpower for a thousand years. We can then add in Carthage, which came within a hair’s breadth of displacing Rome. Africa was impressive on the world stage for far longer than any other continent can even dream of.
But those were the white Africans.
I wish I had time to chase down the cites. I’ve read academics I respect who state that the most recent research demonstrates that Africans developed cattle herding and millet farming independently.
The independent development of steel smelting among sub Saharan Africans is widely recognized.
This is wrong. Sub Saharan Africans have the more immune system diversity than other populations, and more genetic diversity in general. Africans have been living in close proximity to cattle, goats, and other domesticated animals for thousands of years. It was the SSA’s resistance to disease that made them useful as laborers. I think this person is misrepresenting Diamond’s work.
A related question to the OP:
if your time machine landed in Northern Europe circa 500 AD, would you find anything to convince you that the descendants of these people would be capable of advanced civilization?
The reason I ask is two fold:
the discussion here seems crippled by presentism. Many of the posters begin with the assumption that Europe has always enjoyed the stability, prosperity, and technology it has now. But all of these things that make Europe the envy of the world are fairly recent developments.
Northern Europe makes the best case for violent, primitive peoples being able to fully adapt civilization that was developed elsewhere. It took hundreds of years, but in the end, the descendants of iron age pagan herders were able to not just master the civilization developed in the Middle East, but extend it. It’s reasonable to expect that the African descendants of iron age pagan herders can also master and extend civilization developed elsewhere, though one would hope it takes them less time than the Europeans.
China, India, the Arab world already had what anyone would call civilization at a time when Northern Europe was still uncivilized by any definition.
Except for Russia. I’ve read various explanations for Russia’s perpetually problematic situation, from Mongol conquest over a 700 years ago to geography to cultural isolation. There may be some truth to all of these. It’s hard not to marvel at the way that the Baltic states have zoomed forwards but their former occupier, Russia, has fallen backwards.
If you mean sub-Saharan Africa, which is what we have been discussing in this thread, then such evidence would be startling indeed. You see, cattle aren’t native to sub-Saharan Africa. For somebody to domesticate an animal when there aren’t any animals of that type present would be quite a feat.
If you mean North Africa, well that would take some damn strong evidence to be convincing, considering that it is so close to Arabia, where we *know *that cattle herding wasn’t developed independently.
So provide some evidence that it is not true. I’m citing Diamond because as far as I’m aware he is recognised as something of an authority on the subject.
Also, the paper I cited earlier, ‘Recent Acceleration of Adaptive Evolution’ notes there is no evidence of agriculture in sub saharan africa before 4000 years ago.
As for the meaning of what he is saying, I thought it was quite clear. Diamond is arguing that Africa had a head start, but was later overtaken and agriculture was a key factor in this. Read the above passage again, and I don’t see how you can interpret this as meaning anything other than agriculture being adopted earlier in Asia and Europe, while being qualitatively different due to the availability of domesticable plants and animals.
Ultimately, it doesn’t change the various findings of Williamson, Lahn & Voight that some groups have experienced accelerated genetic changes over the past 10,000 years, probably a result of expanding populations, and new social environments (cities, divisions of labour). As the cost of genome sequencing drops it is likely that the implications of these changes will be better understood.
Yes, that;s always the problem isn’t it. Every time there is an exception thrown up that shows the theory to be wrong, the proponents want to declare the people oin the exception are all wearing kilts.
True - good point.
Absolutely - I agree the debate is far from settled. One hopes continued research will sort it out in the future.
It’s put forward as to the seperateness of the Amazonian and PAcific agriculture systems in S America.
I’ve not heard this suggested recently for West Africa. It’s pretty settled that it was an independent development. The timing alone settles that.
I hope this is a whoosh. Neither the Egyptians nor the Carthagians were White by any measure. Not classic “negro”, but not White, either. Quite brown, in fact.
Granted the point on Egyptians (who seem to have covered quite a spectrum), but … Carthaginians? Mate, they were Phoenicians, not Africans, and the dominant type in Lebanon is quite palish.
But you yourself just posted: