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109 9 Domesticates in Africa South of the Sahara The fossil record shows that the first humans evolved in Africa , years ago, and from this continent they slowly traveled across the world, reaching Australia 60,000 years ago, Europe 40,000 years ago, and the Americas 15,000 years ago. Linguistic and genetic evidence indicates that the people who stayed behind are represented today by the last of the San Bushmen. The genetic structure of Bushmen individuals has shown that in their genomic divergencies, they are more different from each other than a European is from an Asian, and they belong to the oldest known lineage of modern humans.1 These people are huntergatherers who live in southern Africa in small protected areas that are in marginal and hardship zones to where they have been driven over the last two millennia, first by the diffusion southward of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists and pastoralists, and later by foreign colonists.2 Until recent rethinking, it was generally accepted by linguists and archaeologists that the first proto-Bantu farming began in the forested region of the Cameroons around 4,000 years ago. It was presumed that population numbers had greatly increased after the people had learned how to forge iron, cultivate cereal crops, and herd livestock as nomadic pastoralists. Migration then became inevitable, and it was hypothesized that around three millennia ago, the Bantu-speaking peoples began to move south and east from West Africa, taking their cattle, sheep, and goats with them; planting their crops with their new iron tools; and building nation-states across the continent. The theory was that while cattle moved south with the eastern stream, sheep moved with the Bantu-speakers down the western side of the continent to arrive at the Cape around 500 ce. However, the remains of very few domestic livestock have been retrieved from the early Iron Age sites in Cameroon, while there is evidence of pastoralists in northern Kenya during the third millennium bce and in southern Kenya by the end of the second millennium bce, so the Cameroon hypothesis may have to be revised.3 By whatever routes they followed, these early Bantu-speaking pastoralists slowly spread everywhere south of the Sahara, but they did not enter an empty land. It was inhabited by hunter-gatherers who lived off the teeming wildlife but who soon began to take advantage of the way of life of the incoming herders. The spread of domestic animals southward through the grasslands of Africa probably had some similarities with the Neolithic spread of the same livestock species from the Near East westward across Europe, only it occurred several millennia later. People who had lived for thousands of years by hunting and gathering slowly changed to the ownership of tamed livestock, and, as in other parts of the world, this change occurred in many different ways, including barter and trade, bride-price, thieving, warfare, 110| Chapter 9 and the migration of the people themselves with their animals. Why this change was worthwhile is more of a problem in Africa than in Europe, where it can be surmised that in the early Neolithic, livestock herding became a new means of obtaining food and resources for human populations that were expanding and causing depletion in the hunters’ prey and in food that could be foraged. For what purposes were the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats kept and tended with such care on the African grasslands, where they had to be given regular water and enclosed in a boma (stockade) every night to protect them from carnivores? It is hard to believe, at least in the early phase of livestock herding, that the animals were important as a source of meat, as there can never have been a lack of wildlife to hunt, and the endemic diseases and parasites carried by tsetse flies and tick-borne fevers must have killed off great numbers of livestock, which, being foreign immigrants, lacked immunity. However, as they settled in different regions of the vast continent with its great variations in climate, parasitic diseases, and other deleterious selective pressures, the pastoralists and their livestock developed a great diversity of adaptive strategies that enabled them to survive and flourish. The ownership of large herds of distinctive breeds of livestock, particularly cattle, then became a symbol of wealth and status for the tribal chiefs. Study of the diverse pastoral economies in Africa has occupied anthropologists for generations since the renowned research of Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer...

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