Kevin,
This drivel can best be understood in the context of a "New and Improved Body
of Work" that panders to those already inclined toward self-delusion.
Diamond, and those of his ilk, are part of an established tradition of Academic
and Theological Prostitutes that set-forth and justified the "european" slave
trade and the slaughter and extermination of the defenseless, helpless, and the
trusting innocent. Not to mention the loss of their Histories, Cultures,
Languages, and their Songs of Hope and love of life!
Soon, justification's for modern day plundering of colonized lands and the
re-enslavement of the so-called indigenous populations, will be supported by
these works; for after all, it's our home lands too! The euro-Asiatics are
progressing to that same end. Recently claims have been made of Finding "New
Evidence" that suggest white people were not invaders of the subcontinent, but
may have inhabited India along side the Black Native Inhabitants; sound
familiar?
Attempting to educate this greedy, blood thirsty, and aristocratic rabble is
futile. They know the truth! They know, because they have taken great pains to
cover-up, cover-over, deny, ignore, hide, steal, distort, re-write history, and
commit an identity theft and fraud, here to fore, unimagined.
The task of "good white people" is to some-how "RAINE-IN THE BAD WHITE PEOPLE",
before the World of Colored People accept the universal nature of an imminent
threat to their personal survival and that of their race; and become, unable or
unwilling to attempt any distinguishable difference between the two.
... And It's not looking good.
More reasons why the Obama Drama is a cruel a front, and deadly hoixe!
...made in america,
I'm Emmett Abati Doe
Kevin White <cuitlacoche1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Nalini,
Grouping people by superficial outward appearance seems a sloppy way to
discern difference.
I had an uncle who married into the family. He was yellow skinned and had
several prominent features associated with African Americans. He raised his two
large nosed, thick lipped children to be terrible racists.
So much so that I cannot stand to be around them.
Race is stupid.
K
----- Original Message ----
From: Nalini Lasiewicz <LasiewiczN@xxxxxxx>
To: NewPacifica@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, March 3, 2008 2:59:52 PM
Subject: [NewPacifica] "How Africa Became Black"
This article is up for discussion. After so many generalizations,
it's refreshing to think about specifics.
NL
============ ========= ========
[fair use, (c) Discover Magazine]
How Africa Became Black
by Jared Diamond
Discover Magazine
02.01.1994
Abstract: Africa's racial history was not necessarily its racial
destiny. To unravel the story of Africa's past, you must not only
look at its faces but listen to its languages and harvest its crops.
Despite all I'd read about Africa, my first impressions upon being
there were overwhelming. As I walked the streets of Windhoek, the
capital of newly independent Namibia, I saw black Herero people and
black Ovambo; I saw Nama, a group quite unlike the blacks in
appearance; I saw whites, descendants of recent European immigrants;
and outside Windhoek I saw the last of the formerly widespread
Kalahari Bushmen struggling for survival. These people were no longer
pictures in a textbook; they were living humans, right in front of
me. But what most surprised me was a street sign on one of downtown
Windhoek's main roads. It read GOERING STREET.
Surely, I thought, no country could be so dominated by unrepentant
Nazis that it would name a street after Hermann Goering, the
notorious head of the Luftwaffe. As it turned out, the street
actually commemorates Hermann's father, Heinrich, founding
Reichskommissar of the German colony of South-West Africa, which
would later be renamed Namibia. But Heinrich is no less a problematic
figure than his son: his legacy includes one of the most vicious
attacks ever carried out by European colonists on Africans, Germany's
1904 War of Extermination against the Herero. Today, while events in
neighboring South Africa command the world's attention, Namibia, too,
struggles to deal with its colonial history and establish a
multiracial society. Namibia illustrated for me how inseparable
Africa's past is from its present.
Most Americans think of native Africans as black and of white
Africans as recent intruders; and when they think of Africa's racial
history they think of European colonialism and slave trading. But
very different types of peoples occupied much of Africa until as
recently as a few thousand years ago. Even before the arrival of
white colonialists, the continent harbored five of what many consider
to be the world's six major divisions of humanity, the so-called
human races, three of which are native to Africa. To this day nearly
30 percent of the world's languages are spoken only in Africa. No
other continent even approaches this human diversity, and no other
continent can rival Africa in the complexity of its human past.
The diversity of Africa's peoples results from its diverse geography
and long prehistory. Africa is the only continent to extend from the
northern to the southern temperate zone; it encompasses some of the
world's driest deserts, largest tropical rain forests, and highest
equatorial mountains. Humans have lived in Africa far longer than
anywhere else: our remote ancestors originated there some 7 million
years ago. With so much time, Africa's peoples have woven a complex,
fascinating story of human interaction, a story that includes two of
the most dramatic population movements of the past 5,000 years: the
Bantu expansion and the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar. All
those interactions are now tangled up in politics because the details
of who arrived where before whom are shaping Africa today.
How did the five divisions of humanity in Africa get to be where they
are today? Why did blacks come to be so widespread, instead of one or
more of the four other groups whose existence Americans tend to
forget? How can we ever hope to wrest the answers to these questions
from Africa's past without written evidence of the sort that taught
us about the spread of the Roman Empire?
African prehistory is a detective story on a grand scale, still only
partly solved. Clues can be derived from the present: from the
peoples living today in Africa, the languages they speak, and their
plant crops and domestic animals. Clues can also be dug up from the
past, from the bones and artifacts of long-dead peoples. By examining
these clues one at a time and then combining all of them, we can
begin to reconstruct who moved where at what time in Africa, and what
let them move--with enormous consequences for the modern continent.
As I mentioned, the africa encountered by the first European
explorers in the fifteenth century was already home to five human
races: blacks, whites, Pygmies, Khoisan, and Asians. The only race
not found in Africa is the aboriginal Australians and their
relatives.
Now, I know that classifying people into arbitrary races is
stereotyping. Each of these groups is actually very diverse, and
lumping people as different as the Zulu, Masai, and Ibo under the
single heading "blacks" ignores the differences between them. So does
lumping Africa's Egyptians and Berbers with each other and with
Europe's Swedes under the single heading "whites." The divisions
between blacks, whites, and the other major groups are arbitrary
anyway because each group shades into the others. All the human
groups on Earth have mated with humans of every other group they've
encountered. Nevertheless, recognizing these major groups and calling
them by these inexact names is a shorthand that makes it easier to
understand history. By analogy, it's also useful to divide classical
music into periods like "baroque," "classical," and "romantic," even
though each period is diverse and shades into other periods.
By the time European colonialists arrived, most of Africa's major
population movements had already taken place(see map). Blacks
occupied the largest area, from the southern Sahara to most of sub-
Saharan Africa. The ancestors of most African Americans came from
Africa's western coastal zone, but similar peoples occupied East
Africa as well, north to the Sudan and south to the southeast coast
of South Africa. They were mostly farmers or herders, as were the
native African whites, who occupied Africa's northern coastal zone
and the northern Sahara. (Few of those northern Africans--the
Egyptians, Libyans, and Moroccans, for instance-- would be confused
with a blond, blue-eyed Swede, but they're often considered white
because they have lighter skin and straighter hair than the peoples
to the south.)
At the same time, the Pygmies were already living in groups widely
scattered through the central African rain forest. Although they were
traditionally hunter-gatherers, they also traded with or worked for
neighboring black farmers. Like their neighbors, the Pygmies are dark-
skinned and have tightly curled hair, but that hair is more thickly
distributed over their body and face. They also are much smaller in
size and have more prominent foreheads, eyes, and teeth.
The Khoisan (pronounced COY-san) are perhaps the group least familiar
to Americans today. In the 1400s they were actually two groups, found
over much of southern Africa: large-statured Khoi herders,
pejoratively known as Hottentots, and smaller San hunter-gatherers,
pejoratively called Bushmen. Most of the Khoi populations no longer
exist; European colonists shot, displaced, or infected many of them,
and the survivors interbred with Europeans. Though the San hunter-
gatherers were similarly shot, displaced, and infected, a dwindling
number managed to preserve their distinctness in Namibian desert
areas unsuitable for agriculture. (They're the people depicted some
years ago in the widely seen film The Gods Must Be Crazy.) The
Khoisan today look quite unlike African blacks: they have light brown
skin sometimes described as yellow, and their hair is even more
tightly coiled.
Of these population distributions, that of North Africa's whites is
the least surprising because physically similar peoples live in
adjacent areas of the Middle East and Europe. Throughout recorded
history people have been moving back and forth between Europe, the
Middle East, and North Africa. But the puzzling placements of blacks,
Pygmies, and Khoisan hint at past population upheavals. Today there
are just 200,000 Pygmies scattered amid 120 million blacks. This
fragmentation suggests that Pygmy hunters lived throughout the
equatorial forests until they were displaced and isolated into small
groups by the arrival of black farmers. Similarly, the Khoisan area
of southern Africa is surprisingly small for a people so distinct in
anatomy and language. Could the Khoisan as well have been originally
more widespread until their more northerly populations were somehow
eliminated?
Perhaps the greatest puzzle, however, involves the island of
Madagascar, which lies just 250 miles off the coast of southeastern
Africa, much closer to Africa than to any other continent. It's in
Madagascar that the fifth African race is found. Madagascar's people
prove to be a mixture of two elements: African blacks and--
surprisingly, given the separation seemingly dictated by the whole
expanse of the Indian Ocean--Southeast Asians, specifically
Indonesians. As it happens, the language of the Malagasy people is
very close to the Ma'anyan language spoken on the Indonesian island
of Borneo, over 4,000 miles away. No one even remotely resembling the
Borneans lives within thousands of miles of Madagascar.
These Indonesians, their language, and their modified culture were
already established on Madagascar by the time it was first visited by
Europeans in 1500. To me this is the single most astonishing fact of
human geography in the whole world. It's as if Columbus, on reaching
Cuba, had found it occupied by blue-eyed, towheaded Scandinavians
speaking a language close to Swedish, even though the nearby North
American continent was inhabited by Indians speaking Indian
languages. How on earth could prehistoric people of Borneo,
presumably voyaging in boats without maps or compasses, have ended up
in Madagascar?
The case of Madagascar shows how peoples' languages, as well as their
physical appearance, can yield important clues to their origins.
Similarly, there's much to be learned from African languages that
can't be gleaned from African faces. In 1963 the mind-boggling
complexities of Africa's 1,500 languages were simplified by the great
linguist Joseph Greenberg of Stanford. Greenberg recognized that all
those languages can be divided into just four broad families. And,
because languages of a given language family tend to be spoken by
distinct peoples, in Africa there are some rough correspondences
between the language families and the anatomically defined human
groups (see map at right). For instance, Nilo- Saharan and Niger-
Congo speakers are black, and Khoisan speakers are Khoisan. Afro-
Asiatic languages, however, are spoken by a wide variety of both
whites and blacks. The language of Madagascar belongs to yet another,
non-African category, the Austronesian language family.
What about the Pygmies? They're the only one of Africa's five races
that lacks a distinct language: each band of Pygmies speaks the
language of its neighboring black farmers. If you compare a given
language as spoken by Pygmies with the same language as spoken by
blacks, however, the Pygmy version contains unique words and,
sometimes, distinctive sounds. That makes sense, of course:
originally the Pygmies, living in a place as distinctive as the
equatorial African rain forest, must have been sufficiently isolated
to develop their own language family. Today, however, those
languages' disappearance and the Pygmies' highly fragmented
distribution both suggest that the Pygmy homeland was engulfed by
invading black farmers. The remaining small bands of Pygmies adopted
the invaders' languages, with only traces of their original languages
surviving in a few words and sounds.
The distribution of Khoisan languages testifies to an even more
dramatic engulfing. Those languages are famously unique--they' re the
ones that use clicks as consonants. All the existing Khoisan
languages are confined to southern Africa, with two exceptions: the
click-laden Hadza and Sandawe languages spoken in Tanzania, some
1,500 miles from their nearest linguistic kin.
In addition, clicks have made it into a few of the Niger-Congo
languages of southern Africa, such as Zulu and Xhosa (which is the
language of Nelson Mandela). Clicks or Khoisan words also appear in
two Afro-Asiatic languages spoken by blacks in Kenya, stranded even
farther from the Khoisan peoples of today than are the Hadza and
Sandawe speakers of Tanzania. All this suggests that Khoisan
languages and peoples formerly extended far north into Africa until
the Khoisan, like the Pygmies, were engulfed by the blacks, leaving
behind only a linguistic legacy to testify to their former presence.
Perhaps the most important discovery from linguistic sleuthing,
however, involves the Niger-Congo language family, which today is
spread all over West Africa and most of subequatorial Africa. Its
current enormous range seems to give no clue as to precisely where
the family originated. However, Greenberg has pointed out that the
Bantu languages of subequatorial Africa, once thought to be their own
language family, are actually a subfamily of the Niger-Congo language
family. (Technically they're a sub-sub-sub- sub-sub-sub- sub-sub-sub-
subfamily.) These Bantu languages today account for nearly half of
the 1,032 Niger-Congo languages, and Bantu speakers account for more
than half (nearly 200 million) of the Niger-Congo speakers. Yet all
494 Bantu languages are so similar to one another that they've been
facetiously described as 494 dialects of a single language.
There are some 170 other such Niger-Congo subfamilies, most of which
are crammed into West Africa, a small fraction of the entire Niger-
Congo range. Even the most distinctive Bantu languages, as well as
the Niger-Congo languages most closely related to Bantu, are
concentrated there, in a tiny area of Cameroon and adjacent east and
central Nigeria.
>From Greenberg's evidence it seems obvious that the Niger-Congo
language family arose in West Africa, while the Bantu subfamily arose
at the east end of that range, in Cameroon and Nigeria, and then
spread out over most of subequatorial Africa. That spread must have
begun sufficiently long ago that the ancestral Bantu language had
time to split into 494 daughter languages, but nevertheless recently
enough that all those daughter languages are still very similar to
one another. Since all Niger- Congo speakers--including the Bantu
speakers--are black, it would be nearly impossible to infer who
migrated in which direction just from the evidence of physical
anthropology.
To make this type of linguistic reasoning clear, let me give you an
example: the geographic origins of the English language. Today the
largest number of people whose first language is English live in
North America, with others scattered over the globe in Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. If we knew nothing else
about language distribution and history, we might have guessed that
the English language arose in North America and was carried overseas
by colonists.
But we know better: we know that each of those countries has its own
English dialect and that all those English dialects make up just one
subgroup of the Germanic language family. The other subgroups--the
various Scandinavian, German, and Dutch languages--are crammed into
northwestern Europe. Frisian, the Germanic language most closely
related to English, is stuck in a tiny coastal area of Holland and
western Germany. Hence a linguist would immediately deduce--correctly-
-that the English language arose on the northwestern coast of Europe
and spread around the world from there.
Essentially the same reasoning tells us that the nearly 200 million
Bantu-speaking people now flung over much of the map of Africa arose
in Cameroon and Nigeria. Thus linguistics tells us not only that the
Pygmies and the Khoisan, who formerly ranged widely over the
continent, were engulfed by blacks; it also tells us that the blacks
who did the engulfing were Bantu speakers. But what it can't tell us
is what allowed the Bantu speakers to displace the Pygmies and
Khoisan.
To answer that question we need to look at a different type of
surviving evidence, that of domesticated plants and animals. Why is
this evidence so crucial? Because farming and herding yield far more
calories per acre than does hunting wild animals or gathering wild
plants. As a result, population densities of farmers and herders are
typically at least ten times those of hunter-gatherers. That's not to
say that farmers are happier, healthier, or in any way superior to
hunter-gatherers. They are, however, more numerous. And that alone is
enough to allow them to kill or displace the hunter-gatherers.
In addition, human diseases such as smallpox and measles developed
from diseases plaguing domestic animals. The farmers eventually
become resistant to those diseases, but hunter-gatherers don't have
the opportunity. So when hunter-gatherers first come into contact
with farmers, they tend to die in droves from the farmers' diseases
(see "The Arrow of Disease," October 1992).
Finally, only in a farming society--with its stored food surpluses
and concentrated villages--do people have the chance to specialize,
to become full-time metalworkers, soldiers, kings, and bureaucrats.
Hence the farmers, and not the hunter-gatherers, are the ones who
develop swords and guns, standing armies, and political organization.
Add that to their sheer numbers and their germs, and it's easy to see
how the farmers in Africa were able to push the hunter-gatherers
aside.
But where in Africa did domesticated plants and animals first appear?
What peoples, by accident of their geographic location, inherited
those plants and animals and thereby the means to engulf their
geographically less-endowed neighbors?
When Europeans reached sub-Saharan Africa in the 1400s, Africans were
growing five sets of crops (see map at right). The first set was
grown only in North Africa, extending as far as the highlands of
Ethiopia. North Africa's rain falls mostly in the winter months--the
region enjoys a Mediterranean climate--so all its original crops are
adapted to germinating and growing with winter rains. Archeological
evidence tells us that such crops--wheat, barley, peas, beans, and
grapes, to name a few--were first domesticated in the Middle East
around 10,000 years ago. So it makes sense that they would have
spread into climatically similar and adjacent areas of North Africa,
laying the foundation for the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Indeed, these crops are familiar to us precisely because they also
spread into climatically similar and adjacent areas of Europe--and
from there to America and Australia--and became some of the staple
crops of temperate-zone agriculture around the world.
There's little rain and little agriculture in the Sahara, but just
south of the desert, in the Sahel zone, the rain returns. The Sahel
rains, however, fall in the summer. So even if winter-rain- adapted
Middle Eastern crops could somehow have crossed the Sahara, it would
still have been hard to grow them in the summer-rain Sahel zone.
Instead, here the Europeans found the second and third sets of
African crops, both of which are adapted to summer rains and the
area's less variable day length.
Set number two is made up of plants whose ancestors were widely
distributed from west to east across the Sahel zone and were probably
domesticated there as well. They include sorghum and pearl millet,
which became the staple cereals of much of sub-Saharan Africa, as
well as cotton, sesame, watermelon, and black-eyed peas. Sorghum
proved so valuable that it is now grown in hot, dry areas on all the
continents.
The wild ancestors of the third set of African crops are found only
in Ethiopia and were probably domesticated there. Indeed, most of
them are still grown only there: few Americans have ever tasted
Ethiopia's finger millet beer, its oily noog, its narcotic chat, or
its national bread, which is made from a tiny-seeded cereal called
teff. But we all have the ancient Ethiopian farmers to thank for the
domestication of a plant we know exceedingly well: the coffee plant,
which remained confined to Ethiopia until it caught on in Arabia and
then spread around the globe.
The fourth set of African crops was domesticated from wild ancestors
in the wet climate of West Africa. Some of them, including African
rice, have remained virtually confined there; others, such as African
yams, eventually spread throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa; and
two, the oil palm and the kola nut, spread to other continents. West
Africans were chewing the caffeine-containing kola nut as a stimulant
long before the Coca-Cola Company enticed Americans to drink its
extracts.
The plants in the last batch of African crops are also adapted to wet
climates. Bananas, Asian yams, and taro were widespread in sub-
Saharan Africa when the Europeans arrived, and Asian rice was well
established on the coast of East Africa. But these crops didn't come
from Africa. They came from Southeast Asia, and their presence in
Africa would be astonishing if the presence of Indonesians in
Madagascar hadn't already alerted us to Africa's prehistoric Asian
connection.
Let's consider the four indigenous groups of crops. All four-- from
North Africa, the Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa--came from north
of the equator. No wonder the Niger-Congo speakers, people who also
came from north of the equator, were able to displace Africa's
equatorial Pygmies and subequatorial Khoisan peoples. The Khoisan and
the Pygmies weren't unsuited for the farming life; it was just that
southern Africa's wild plants were unsuitable for domestication. Even
the Bantu and the white farmers, heirs to thousands of years of
farming experience, have rarely been able to develop southern
Africa's native plants into food crops.
Because there are so few of them, summarizing Africa's domesticated
animal species is much easier than summarizing its plants. The list
doesn't include even one of the big wild mammals for which Africa is
famous--its zebras and wildebeests, its rhinos and hippos, its
giraffes and Cape buffalo. The wild ancestors of domestic cattle,
pigs, dogs, and house cats were native to North Africa but also to
western Asia, so we can't be sure where they were first domesticated.
The rest of Africa's domestic mammals must have been domesticated
somewhere else because their wild ancestors occur only in Eurasia.
Africa's sheep and goats were domesticated in western Asia, its
chickens in Southeast Asia, its horses in southern Russia, and its
camels probably in Arabia. The one exception is the donkey, which is
widely believed to have been domesticated in North Africa.
Many of Africa's food staples and domesticated animals thus had to
travel a long way from their point of origin, both inside and outside
Africa. Some people were just luckier than others, inheriting suites
of domesticable wild plant and animal species. We have to suspect
that some of the "lucky" Africans parlayed their advantage into an
engulfing of their neighbors.
But all the evidence I've presented thus far--evidence from modern
human and language distributions and from modern crops and domestic
animals--is only an indirect means to reconstruct the past. To get
direct evidence about who was living where when, and what they were
eating or growing, we need to turn to archeology and the things it
turns up: the bones of people and their domestic animals, the remains
of the pottery and the stone and iron tools they made, and the
remains of the buildings they constructed.
This evidence can help explain at least some of the mystery of
Madagascar. Archeologists exploring the island report that
Indonesians arrived before A.D. 800, possibly as early as 300, and in
a full-fledged expedition: the earliest human settlements on
Madagascar include the remains of iron tools, livestock, and crops.
This was no small canoeload of fishermen blown off course.
Clues to how this expedition came about can be found in an ancient
book of sailors' directions, the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, which
was written by an anonymous merchant living in Egypt around A.D. 100.
The merchant describes an already thriving sea trade connecting India
and Egypt with the coast of East Africa. When Islam began to spread
after the beginning of the ninth century, Indian Ocean trade became
well documented archeologically by copious quantities of Middle
Eastern and occasionally even Chinese products such as pottery,
glass, and porcelain found in East African coastal settlements. The
traders waited for favorable winds to let them cross the Indian Ocean
directly between East Africa and India.
But there was an equally vigorous sea trade from India eastward, to
Indonesia. Perhaps the Indonesian colonists of Madagascar reached
India by that route, then fell in with the westward trade route to
East Africa, where they joined with Africans and discovered
Madagascar. The union of Indonesians and East Africans appears to
live on today in Madagascar's basically Indonesian language, which
contains loan words from coastal Kenyan Bantu languages. But there's
a problem: there are no corresponding Indonesian loan words in Kenyan
languages. Indeed, there are few Indonesian traces in East Africa
besides some musical instruments like the xylophone and the zither
and the Indonesian crops discussed earlier. Is it possible that the
Indonesians, instead of taking the easier route to Madagascar via
India and East Africa, somehow--incredibly --sailed straight across
the Indian Ocean, discovered Madagascar, and only later got plugged
into East African trade routes? We still don't know the answer.
The same sorts of archeological evidence found in Madagascar can be
found on the African continent itself. In some cases they can help
prove hypotheses that the other evidence could never fully resolve.
For instance, linguistic and population distribution evidence merely
suggests that the Khoisan were once widespread in the drier parts of
subequatorial Africa. But archeologists in Zambia, to the north of
the modern Khoisan range, have in fact found skulls of people
resembling the modern Khoisan, as well as stone tools resembling
those the Khoisan peoples were making in southern Africa when the
Europeans arrived.
There are, of course, cases in which archeology can't help. We assume
from indirect evidence that Pygmies were once widespread in the wet
rain forest of central Africa, but it's difficult for archeologists
to test this assumption: although they've found artifacts to show
that people were there, they have yet to discover ancient human
skeletons.
Archeology also helps us determine the actual dates and places for
the rise of farming and herding in Africa, which, as I've said, is
the key to understanding how one group of people was able to conquer
the whole continent. Any reader steeped in the history of Western
civilization would be forgiven for assuming that African food
production began in ancient Egypt's Nile Valley, land of pharaohs and
pyramids. After all, by 3000 B.C., Egypt was undoubtedly the site of
Africa's most complex society. Yet the earliest evidence for food
production in Africa comes not from the Nile Valley but from, believe
it or not, the Sahara.
Archeologists are able to say this because they have become expert at
identifying and dating plants from remains as fragmentary as charred
seeds recognizable only under a microscope. Although today much of
the Sahara is so dry that it can't even support grass, archeologists
have found evidence that between 9000 and 4000 B.C. the Sahara was
more humid; there were numerous lakes, and the desert teemed with
game. The Saharans tended cattle and made pottery, then began to keep
sheep and goats; they may even have started to domesticate sorghum
and millet. This Saharan pastoralism began well before food
production got its start in Egypt, in 5200 B.C., when a full package
of western Asian winter crops and livestock arrived. Farming then
spread to West Africa and Ethiopia. By around 2500 B.C. cattle
herders had already crossed the modern border of Ethiopia into
northern Kenya.
Linguistics offers another way to date the arrival of crops: by
comparing words for crops in related modern languages that diverged
from each other at various times in the past. It thus becomes clear,
for instance, that the people who were domesticating sorghum and
millet in the Sahara thousands of years ago spoke languages ancestral
to modern Nilo- Saharan languages. Similarly, the people who first
domesticated the wet- country crops of West Africa spoke languages
ancestral to the modern Niger- Congo languages. The people who spoke
ancestral Afro-Asiatic languages were certainly involved in the
introduction of Middle Eastern crops into North Africa and may have
been responsible for the domestication of crops native to Ethiopia.
Analyzing the names of crops leaves us with evidence that there were
at least three ancestral languages spoken in Africa thousands of
years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Afro-Asiatic. And
other linguistic evidence points to an ancestral Khoisan language
(that evidence, however, doesn't come from crop names, since the
ancestral Khoisan people didn't domesticate any crops). Surely, since
Africa harbors 1,500 languages today, it was big enough to harbor
more than four ancestral languages in the past. But all those other
languages must have disappeared, either because the peoples speaking
them lost their original languages, as the Pygmies did, or because
the peoples themselves disappeared.
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