The origins of African agriculture

rchaeologists have long believed that food production developed worldwide much the way it did in the Near East: as climate changes made wild grains less available, hunters and gatherers settled in villages and relatively quickly domesticated plants and then, over the next few thousand years, animals.

But recent genetic studies and excavations in Africa suggest that the patterns of domestication there were strikingly different. This new research, emerging in the last few years in academic books and articles, shows that in Africa, wild cattle were domesticated several thousand years before plants, and that farming and herding spread patchily and slowly across the continent.

Posted by David on July 26, 2004 10:55 PM