quote: For centuries, archaeologists believed that ancient people couldn't live in tropical jungles. The environment was simply too harsh and challenging, they thought. As a result, scientists simply didn't look for clues of ancient civilizations in the tropics. Instead, they turned their attention to the Middle East, where we have ample evidence that hunter-gatherers settled down in farming villages 9,000 years ago during a period dubbed the "Neolithic revolution." Eventually, these farmers' offspring built the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the great pyramids of Egypt. It seemed certain that city life came from these places and spread from there around the world.
But now that story seems increasingly uncertain. In an article published in Nature Plants, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Patrick Roberts and his colleagues explain that cities and farms are far older than we think. Using techniques ranging from genetic sampling of forest ecosystems and isotope analysis of human teeth, to soil analysis and lidar, the researchers have found ample evidence that people at the equator were actively changing the natural world to make it more human-centric.
It all started about 45,000 years ago. At that point, people began burning down vegetation to make room for plant resources and homes. Over the next 35,000 years, the simple practice of burning back forest evolved. People mixed specialized soils for growing plants; they drained swamps for agriculture; they domesticated animals like chickens; and they farmed yam, taro, sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, and bananas.
École française d'Extrême-Orient archaeologist Damian Evans, a co-author on the Nature paper, said that it wasn't until a recent conference brought international researchers together that they realized they'd discovered a global pattern. Very similar evidence for ancient farming could be seen in equatorial Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Much later, people began building "garden cities" in these same regions, where they lived in low-density neighborhoods surrounded by cultivated land.
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Actually they have been saying this for a while in various studies and in different ways..... I actually believe that there is a lot of stuff about equatorial Africa and other parts of Africa being kept from the public....
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quote: For centuries, archaeologists believed that ancient people couldn't live in tropical jungles. The environment was simply too harsh and challenging, they thought. As a result, scientists simply didn't look for clues of ancient civilizations in the tropics. Instead, they turned their attention to the Middle East, where we have ample evidence that hunter-gatherers settled down in farming villages 9,000 years ago during a period dubbed the "Neolithic revolution." Eventually, these farmers' offspring built the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the great pyramids of Egypt. It seemed certain that city life came from these places and spread from there around the world.
But now that story seems increasingly uncertain. In an article published in Nature Plants, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Patrick Roberts and his colleagues explain that cities and farms are far older than we think. Using techniques ranging from genetic sampling of forest ecosystems and isotope analysis of human teeth, to soil analysis and lidar, the researchers have found ample evidence that people at the equator were actively changing the natural world to make it more human-centric.
It all started about 45,000 years ago. At that point, people began burning down vegetation to make room for plant resources and homes. Over the next 35,000 years, the simple practice of burning back forest evolved. People mixed specialized soils for growing plants; they drained swamps for agriculture; they domesticated animals like chickens; and they farmed yam, taro, sweet potato, chili pepper, black pepper, mango, and bananas.
École française d'Extrême-Orient archaeologist Damian Evans, a co-author on the Nature paper, said that it wasn't until a recent conference brought international researchers together that they realized they'd discovered a global pattern. Very similar evidence for ancient farming could be seen in equatorial Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Much later, people began building "garden cities" in these same regions, where they lived in low-density neighborhoods surrounded by cultivated land.
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It'd seem that they cite this paper when they talk about Africa. Unfortunately I can't find it:
Mercader, J. Forest people: the role of African rainforests in human evolution and dispersal. Evol. Anthr. 11, 117–124 (2002)
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" Farming and Herding in Eastern Africa: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives"
Freda Nkirote M'Mbogori
Subject: Archaeology, East Africa and Indian Ocean, Economic History Jul 2017 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.134
Abstract and Keywords
The inception of agriculture in eastern Africa is a major topic of discussion among Africanist archaeologists, although very sparse evidence exists. Questions range from whether domestication was a local invention or whether it was introduced from the Near East, Asia, or elsewhere outside of Africa. These questions have remained unanswered because wild progenitors and models of the spread of African domesticates are yet to be established using undisputable data. The paucity of direct data has therefore necessitated the use of objects of material culture such as pottery, beads, burial cairns, architectural structures, and so on as indicators of pastoralism and cereal farming. In addition to the origins of African domesticates, research in eastern Africa has concerned itself with questions of farming technologies from later archaeological and historical times to the present. The remains of elaborate farming systems with extensive irrigation networks have drawn considerable attention. Though not unchanged, some of these farming systems remain in contemporary use in Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia.
Keywords: domestication, pastoralism, crops, Pastoral Neolithic, Iron Age, intensive agriculture"
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Australian (Pygmies/Gods) brought red cabbage palm to the desert 30,000 years ago, according to their oral history and confirmed by plant genetics.
"There’s an interesting recent paper on the genetic basis of the changes we see in domestication – and the extent to which humans exhibit similar genetic changes. domesticated species end to have depigmentation, floppy ears, shorter muzzles, curly tails, smaller teeth, smaller cranial capacity, neotenous behavior, reduced sexual dimorphism, docility, and more frequent estrous cycles: the ‘domestication syndrome’. There is reason to think that this syndrome arises from a mild deficit of neural crest cells.
We know that some populations split off as long as a quarter of a million years ago. Although the earliest known AMH skeletons already show signs of the domestication syndrome ( the childlike flat face), their skulls were a good deal more robust than those of any people today. Probably the process has continued over time, quite possibly it even accelerated in dense agriculture agricultural populations in the Holocene. But that wouldn’t have taken the same course everywhere.
Members of populations that have gone further down the path of self-domestication should be easier to enslave. [DD: I think he's referring to depigmented people there.]
quote:Originally posted by Oshun: if there are more studies that say this please share thnx
I posted some research in the threads related to Basal Eurasian and the Abusir Mummy paper. It was along the lines of my point that the development of farming was an evolution that started thousands of years earlier in Africa and that migrating Africans introduced this to the Levant. I will look for it when I get a chance.
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"Agro-Pastoral people cultivated crops and herded cattle. Elements of the Agro-Pastoral members of the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware complexes appear first in the African Sahara. Here, we see rock engravings of cattle herders and hunters using similar bow and arrows. The Yamnaya archers' wrist-guard and bows may have had their origin in the Sahara where we see similar wrist-guards (Le Quellec, 2011).
Daugas et al., (1989) provides a number of radio carbon dates for the Bell Beaker complex in North Africa. We find Beaker Bell ware dating to 3700 BC in Morocco. By 2700 BC we see the expansion of Beaker complex into Iberia (Daugas et al., 1989). The Iberian Bell Beaker complex is associated with the “Maritime tradition” (Mathieson et al., 2017; Turek, 2012).
There are numerous Bell Beaker sites in the Sahara and Morocco. A center of the Moroccan Beaker complex ceramics and arrowheads come from Hassi Ouenzga and in the cave of Ifri Ouberrid. Artifacts found at these sites are similar to Iberian Beaker complex forms (Nekkal and Mikdad, 2014). The interesting fact about the discovery of these artifacts is that they were widespread across the Middle Atlas mountains at sites such as El-Kiffen, Skhirat – de Rouazi, Kehf, That el Gher and Ifri Ouberrid (Guilaine, 1976; Mikdad, 1998; Nekka and Mikdad, 2014). This finding matches Turek (2012); which explains the spread of typically beaker style stamped decoration Bell Beaker culture pottery from Morocco into Iberia, and thence the rest of Europe.
Kivisild (2017) and Mathieson et al., (2017), provides a detailed discussion of R1 in prehistoric Europe. One of the most interesting finding was the presence of V88 in ancient Europe (Haak et al., 2015; Kivisild, 2017; Mathieson et al., 2017). It is also interesting to note that the European Agro-Pastoral populations associated with Bell Beaker and Yamnaya carry the genomes associated with Africans recorded in 2010 as illustrated in Figure 1 and Table 2. "
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