Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations
- 1 The historical geography of Africa
- 2 Kingdoms on the Nile
- 3 The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa: society, culture, and language
- 4 Crops, cows, and iron
- 5 Northeast Africa in the age of Aksum
- 6 Empires of the plains
- 7 East Africa and the Indian Ocean world
- 8 The Lake Plateau of East Africa
- 9 Societies and states of the West African forest
- 10 Kingdoms and trade in Central Africa
- 11 The peoples and states of southern Africa
- Part II Africa in World History
- Part III Imperial Africa
- Part IV Independent Africa
- Index
- References
4 - Crops, cows, and iron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Foundations
- 1 The historical geography of Africa
- 2 Kingdoms on the Nile
- 3 The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa: society, culture, and language
- 4 Crops, cows, and iron
- 5 Northeast Africa in the age of Aksum
- 6 Empires of the plains
- 7 East Africa and the Indian Ocean world
- 8 The Lake Plateau of East Africa
- 9 Societies and states of the West African forest
- 10 Kingdoms and trade in Central Africa
- 11 The peoples and states of southern Africa
- Part II Africa in World History
- Part III Imperial Africa
- Part IV Independent Africa
- Index
- References
Summary
Although there is circumstantial evidence that the inhabitants of southern Africa and the Nile valley sought to manipulate the growth of plants as early as eighteen thousand years ago, the systematic domestication of plants, or agriculture, evolved independently in the Middle East about 8000 bce, and by 4000 bce, there were substantial agricultural settlements along the banks of the Nile and in its delta. There is still controversy as to whether the domestic cultivation of crops in the Nile valley was borrowed from the nearby Fertile Crescent or evolved locally in the rich soil deposited on the banks of the river; it was probably a bit of both. Whatever its origins, this agricultural revolution made possible the evolution of settled communities. Hunting and gathering was an inefficient means of survival, let alone procreation. Hunting was dangerous, limited to small animals or, for the hominids, scavenging the remains left by more powerful carnivores. Gathering, although more mundane, could be an unreliable and often arduous enterprise. There are two hundred thousand species of wild plants, but most are indigestible, poisonous, without nutrition, hard to gather, or difficult to prepare. Only a very few, no more than a dozen, were edible and available for Homo sapiens. One acre of any one of them cultivated by farmers could support a hundred times the number of hunter-gatherers, who have consequently been overwhelmed over the last two millennia by the slow but steadily increasing numbers of Africans practicing agriculture.
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- A History of Sub-Saharan Africa , pp. 52 - 63Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013