The Origins of Agriculture in West Africa Oliver Davies Current Anthropology Vol. 9, No. 5, Part 2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 479-482 (4 pages) Published By: The University of Chicago Press
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
^ Nonsense. West Africa is just fine without ancient Egypt.
The independent invention of agriculture in West Africa has been known for over half a century. Here is a synopsis and sources for West African farming. Let me know what you think of these books sometime. Enjoy
Words in the reconstructed proto Niger-Congo language spoken 8000 BCE indicate some primitive agriculture was going on. C. Ehret & M. Posansky (editors) The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Proliferation of pili nut leaves from the south of modern Ghana 5000 BCE imply that this otherwise wild plant was aided in its growth by human effort. J. D. Clark & S. A. Brandt (editors) From Hunters to Farmers Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press 1984
Hunter-gatherers were overlooking wild grain fields and making clearings so that oil palms and wild yams could grow unentangled. J. V. S. Megaw (editor) Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe Leicester: Leicester University Press 1977 T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B.Andah & A.Okpoko (editors) The Archaeology of Africa: foods, metals and towns London: Routledge 1993
By 4000 BCE an agricultural complex including millet, sorghum and peas among others shows an invention of cultivation that owed nothing to the so-called Southwest Asian farming complex was in full development by Mande speakers along the Niger. G. P. Murdock Africa: its peoples and their culture history. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1959
Would really appreciate a hi-res copy of Murdock's map. It's missing from my copy bought back in the 1980's. Did come across it again in a Westerfield bookshop. I refused to pay $80 for just a map out of a book I already owned. Sheesh, what a big L for me
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
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West Africans did not sit helplessly waiting for imaginary anc Egys to give them anything
Iron working is an independent invention of West Africans from ~5000 BP.
Egaro Niger so far holds the earliest iron age record at 2900 BCE (all dates follow L. M. Maes Diop's reckoning) possibly predating Gizeh and Abydos.
Neighboring Termit's last iron days were contemporary with the Amarna age but started 700 years earlier. Oliga Cameroun is another West African site contemporary with the Amarna age.
In Nigeria Nok (950 BCE) and Taruga (880 BCE) foundations predate Piye and are roughly contemporary with the settling of the Phoenicians at Carthage.
Tigidit Niger comes later (8th cent BCE) but still like all the above it's earlier than Meroe, the premier iron foundry of the Nile Valley.
Although it was once considered a fact in the 1940's that iron was an Inner African discovery it's generally taught that iron in Africa was a late adaptation and of an extra-African origin. The African process of making iron however, considerably differs from Anatolian metallurgy. Both regions' discoveries are independent of one another. Africans use direct reduction to form iron crystals instead of sintering solid particles. This is akin to semi-conductor technology as much as it is traditional smelting.
Fig. 1 - African "Male" kiln
The leap from stone age directly to iron challenges the accepted understanding of a gradation in metals use from copper and various intermediary metals to iron. Yet the African process produces iron and steel from the same kilning. Steel production remained an unknown outside of Africa and India until somewhere between the 14th and 19th centuries.
Unlike other continents, or in Meroe itself, iron was shrouded by mystic underpinnings thought integral to its making yet served to disable it from further advancements in production, use, and distribution of a kind that led to the industrial age (the Bassari were on their way to overcoming the non- technical limitations). Still, African iron remained the superior product. This iron, or rather carbon steel, was manufactured in furnaces attaining temperatures sometimes exceeding 1800°C (3275°F). It was exported to India where it was used in the synthesis of the famous ukku (wootz) steel for weapons manufacture.
Fig. 2 - African "Female" kiln
Of the films below I've seen Tree of Iron where, following the instructions of a 2000 year old oral manual, moderns construct and produce carbon steel from a type of kiln and a technology not used for centuries due to its environmental effects (depletion of forrestry). Tree of Iron can be compared and contrasted to Inagina for the relatedness of ancient African ferrous metallurgy from regions as far apart as the Great Lakes (TaNzania) and the Niger Bend (Mali).
Eeeeeeeeee blacksmiths are numerous, Aaaaaaah but those who can melt iron from stone have grown rare. Beekillers are many. Lionhunters are few. -West African Song
For Gérard Quéchon, the French archeologist to whom we owe very early dates for iron metallurgy from the Termit Massif in Niger, “indisputably, in the present state of knowledge, the hypothesis of an autochthonous invention is convincing.” [1]
According to Eric Huysecom, a Belgian-born archeologist, “[o]ur present knowledge allows us . . . to envisage one or several independent centres of metal innovation in sub-Saharan Africa.” [2]
Hamady Bocoum, a Senegalese archeologist, asserts that “more and more numerous datings are pushing back the beginning of iron production in Africa to at least the middle of the second millennium BC, which would make it one of the world’s oldest metallurgies.” He thinks that “in the present state of knowledge, the debate [over diffusion vs. independent invention] is closed for want of conclusive proof accrediting any of the proposedtransmission channels [from the north].” [3]
The American archeologist Peter R. Schmidt tells us “the hypothesis for independent invention is currently the most viable among the multitude of diffusionist hypotheses.” [4]
Africanists other than archeologists are in agreement. For Basil Davidson, the foremost popularizer of African history, “African metallurgical skills [were] locally invented and locally developed.” [5]
The American linguist Christopher Ehret says
quote:Africa south of the Sahara, it now seems, was home to a separate and independent invention of iron metallurgy . . . To sum up the available evidence, iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 1000 BCE. [6]
The eminent British historian Roland Oliver thinks that the discovery of iron smelting “could have occurred many times over” in the world and that African ironworking probably originated in the northern one-third of the continent. [7]
The equally eminent Belgian-American historian Jan Vansina took the rather extreme position that “[i]ron smelting began in several places at about the same time,” naming the - western Great Lakes area, - Gabon, - Termit Massif, - Taruga site in central Nigeria and the - Igbo region in southeastern Nigeria. He maintained that “[a] simple dispersal even from Taruga to the Igbo sites not far away is excluded because different types of furnaces were used.” [8]
In the concluding chapter of UNESCO’s recent book on the subject, the Senegalese-born scholar Louise-Marie Maes-Diop surveys the beginnings of iron metallurgy worldwide and finds “the earliest vestiges of reduced ore” in eastern Niger, followed by Egypt. [9]
Gérard Quéchon, “Les datations de la métallurgie du fer à Termit (Niger): leur fiabilité, leur signification” in Hamady Bocoum, ed., Aux origines de la métallurgie du fer en Afrique: une ancienneté méconnue (Paris, 2002), 114. The same statement is found in an almost identical chapter with the same title by Quéchon in Mediterranean Archaeology 14 (2001) (hereafter Meditarch), 253. That issue is titled “The Origins of Iron Metallurgy: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on the Archaeology of Africa and the Mediterranean Basin Held at the Museum of Natural History in Geneva, 4-7 June, 1999.” ) .
Eric Huysecom, “The Beginning of Iron Metallurgy: From Sporadic Inventions to Irreversible Generalizations,” Meditarch, 3. .
Hamady Bocoum, “La métallurgie du fer en Afrique: un patrimoine et une ressource au service du développement” in Bocoum, Origines, 94, 97. UNESCO published an English translation of Bocoum’s book in 2004 under the title The Origins of Iron Metallurgy in Africa: New Light on Its Antiquity—West and Central Africa. .
Peter R. Schmidt, “Cultural Representations of African Iron Production” in Schmidt, ed., The Culture and Technology of African Iron Production (Gainesville, 1996), 8. .. See also: Pierre de Maret, “L’Afrique centrale: Le `savoir-fer’” in Bocoum, Origines, 125; . François Paris, Alain Person, Gérard Quéchon, and Jean-François Saliège, “Les débuts de la métallurgie au Niger septentrional: Aïr, Azawagh, Ighazer, Termit,” Journal des Africanistes 72(1992), 58; . Schmidt and D.H. Avery, “More Evidence for an Advanced Prehistoric Iron Technology in Africa,” Journal of Field Archaeology 10(1983), 428, 432-34; . Candice L. Goucher, “Iron Is Iron ’Til It Is Rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting,” JAH 22(1981), 180; . John A. Rustad, “The Emergence of Iron Technology in West Africa, with Special Emphasis on the Nok Culture of Nigeria” in B.K. Swartz and R. Dumett, eds., West African Culture Dynamics: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives (The Hague, 1980), 237. .
Basil Davidson, West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850 (London, 1998), 8. .
Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: a History to 1800 (Charlottesville, 2002), 161. Curiously, he suggests African iron metallurgy was developed in two places, northern Nigeria/Cameroon and the Great Lakes region, while ignoring Niger, source of the earliest available dates. .
Roland Oliver, The African Experience (New York, 1991), 65. .
Jan Vansina, “Historians, Are Archeologists Your Siblings?” HA 22(1995), 395. .. See also: John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (2d ed.: Cambridge, 1998), 46; . P.T. Craddock and J. Picton, “Medieval Copper Alloy Production and West African Bronze Analyses–Part II,” Archaeometry 28 (1986), 6; . Ralph A. Austen and Daniel Headrick, “The Role of Technology in the African Past,” African Studies Review 26 (1983), 165-68. .
Louise-Marie Maes-Diop, “Bilan des datations des vestiges anciens de la sidérurgie en Afrique: l’enseignement qui s’en dégage” in Bocoum, Origines, 189. Thirty-four years earlier Maes-Diop had written that “in all probability, iron metallurgy on the African continent is autochthonous and was not introduced through external influences,” but hers was a lonely voice then. L.-M. Diop, “Métallurgie traditionnelle et âge du fer en Afrique,” BIFAN 30B (1968), 36.
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: [QB]Words in the reconstructed proto Niger-Congo language spoken 8000 BCE indicate some primitive agriculture was going on. C. Ehret & M. Posansky (editors) The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Niger-Congo speakers are predominantly E-M2, which originated in Eastern Africa. Niger-Congo speakers except for perhaps the Mande, were not in Western Africa 8,000 BC. They lived in the fertile Sahara during period. There is no evidence of immediate settlement in tropical West Africa from populations retreating from the drying Sahara.
quote:Proliferation of pili nut leaves from the south of modern Ghana 5000 BCE imply that this otherwise wild plant was aided in its growth by human effort. J. D. Clark & S. A. Brandt (editors) From Hunters to Farmers Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press 1984
Are you insinuating that this is a what lead a "unique" Neolithic revolution in West Africa? What did this crop cultivation develop into, and what evidence do we see of it today? Did this play a role in the forming of Tropical Western Africa's first civilization, which was Nok? Does this take away from the fact that the style of farming in terms of it's crops (millet and Sorghum) in what lead to Nok civilization could have only have came by way of a sub tropical environment? What sub tropical African culture other than Kemet can this be attributed to?
quote: Hunter-gatherers were overlooking wild grain fields and making clearings so that oil palms and wild yams could grow unentangled. J. V. S. Megaw (editor) Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe Leicester: Leicester University Press 1977 T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B.Andah & A.Okpoko (editors) The Archaeology of Africa: foods, metals and towns London: Routledge 1993
Isn't it known that these early West African foragers were Pygmies? The Nok civilization to my knowledge was not created by Pygmies.
"Ancient West African foragers in the context of African population history Mark Lipson, Isabelle Ribot, […]David Reich
Nature (2020)
Our knowledge of ancient human population structure in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly prior to the advent of food production, remains limited. Here we report genome-wide DNA data from four children—two of whom were buried approximately 8,000 years ago and two 3,000 years ago—from Shum Laka (Cameroon), one of the earliest known archaeological sites....However, the genome-wide ancestry profiles of all four individuals are most similar to those of present-day hunter-gatherers from western Central Africa, which implies that populations in western Cameroon today—as well as speakers of Bantu languages from across the continent—are not descended substantially from the population represented by these four people"
Hunter and gather's do not create civilization. Therefore the Nok agriculture was likely not a further development of what these distinct Africans were already doing.
quote: By 4000 BCE an agricultural complex including millet, sorghum and peas among others shows an invention of cultivation that owed nothing to the so-called Southwest Asian farming complex was in full development by Mande speakers along the Niger. G. P. Murdock Africa: its peoples and their culture history. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1959
This is where the mixing of geographic locations and peoples become problematic. "West Africa" in terms of the Mande people is almost always in reference to the "Western Sahara" and particularly along the Northwest bend of the Niger river.
not the more tropical/rainforest environments to the South (i.e Ghana, Togo, Nigeria).
We KNOW from the formation of Dhar Tichitt by the Mande around 2,000 BC along with other things that these Africans simply migrated further to the West when the Sahara began to dry up. We KNOW that the Sahara had it's OWN Neolithic, and the domesticates reflect that these early "Western Saharan" Africans were the product of this African Neolithic.
E-M2 probably expanded from north Cameroon where it coalesced 4000 years earlier from LGAM Mayo Louti cultural site men who were likely ancestral to the Fali. Green Sahara E-M2 moved north from Cameroon following the northward expanding fertile grassland landscapes.
A science article within the past year published data on prehistoric Cameroun including RainForester genetics and frequencies. ES or actual article citation anyone? [EDIT]
Meanwhile please provide at least 3 references that Rain Foresters smelt metal or cultivate flora. Good luck! These peoples are foragers (hunter/gatherers).
Not going rounds with you on this. Myopic polemicists give me the business. Enough posted above for investigative readers to research on their own or can continue believing in a mystical magical ancient Egypt the birthplace of everything African from people to industries.
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Foundations (restored map imgs)
32KYA Sangoan industrial complex in river valleys south of the Jos Plateau and north of the forrest including Jebba (near Old Oyo).
12KYA Osteo-remains of Iwo Eleru (near Akure in what would be the heartland of Ife kingdom) are associated with the late stone age phase I facies A industry of hunters who used microliths but were without pottery or ground stone axes.
3600 - 1500 BCE Guinea neolithic industry of the late stone age phase II facies A type is at Iwo Eleru and Mejiro Cave (up in Old Oyo). Pottery and ground stone axes appear alongside the microliths. Farming begins to allow for population density. There are orchards (oil palms) under which clearings were made for gardening of roots (yams) and nuts (kola).
1000 - 1BCE Southbound Saharan pastoralist enter the general region losing their easily worked flint and adopting the harder quartz available locally. Their tool kit thus loses its aesthetics though retaining its effectiveness.
350 BCE Ife comes into existance as 13 hamlets of farming villages.
950 CE Completely urbanized, Ife is producing elaborate glass bead work (akori and segi beads), specialized naturalistic sculpture (terracottas by women; stone, metal, and wood by men; castings by joint effort), and highly decorated domestic pottery. The city now starts to pave its streets and courtyards with terracotta bricks.
Ile-Ife is the place where the consciousness of ethnic identity for the Anago began. It was the central place of creation for them and from there radiated religious and political authority to the many cities who claim origins in Ile-Ife whether or not their inhabitants were Anagos.
It was internal trade that fostered the late neolithic villages and towns and early iron age cities. The subsequent emergence of Yoruba kingdoms and their Oyo empire depended essentially on a highly successful exploitation of their environment due to indigenous genius.
posted
"Iron working is an independent invention of West Africans from ~5000 BP.
Egaro Niger so far holds the earliest iron age record at 2900 BCE (all dates follow L. M. Maes Diop's reckoning) possibly predating Gizeh and Abydos."
Again this problem of equating peoples with a geographic location is clouting the picture of the situation. Niger for all practical purposes can be seen as a Saharan region. \
This region due to it's geography housed a great deal of Africa's populations for about 3-4k years. When it's geography changed to desert it pushed the people to the East to form Nile Valley civilization, and not to the South and west (save the Mande) for the most part. If this technology is a legacy of "West Africa" whatever peoples that is supposed to imply..then did not carry on the tradition for millenniums. In Kemet we have evidence of at least them having knowledge of how to work hard substances with the presence of the meteorite beads that were crafted during the emergence of the dynasties.
posted
"Meanwhile please provide at least 3 references that Rain Foresters smelt metal or cultivate flora."
Please elaborate on what you mean here man..
It seems that you are implying that there is a legacy of farming and iron working in this mythical family/region that you refer as "West African". Unless you're going to argue that West Africa had it's own unique Neolithic, then shouldn't you have evidence of mass settlements throughout West Africa from the 6th millennium BC onward? We have PLENTY of evidence of mass resettlement on the Nile.
We know that there was a full blown Neolithic in the Sahara that diffused on the river Nile. Why would the ones who went West (as you claim) have to start out at more "primitive" stages of agriculture unlike those in the East?
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Guy broaches a thread and titles it Topic: West African Agriculture diffused from Nile Valley Civilization
then turns around and declares there is no West Africa(n)
quote:mythical family/region that you refer as "West African"
^ Why I ignore obvious nutjobs living in a world all their own and leave the rational folk to examine archaeology anthropology ethnography history etc references.
Like Schroedinger's cat, in Big0 World West Africa(ns) exist(s) and doesn't exist at the same time pending the polemic's propaganda of the moment.
Goodbye Big0
Unable to fulfill a simple request aNY college freshman can easily perform you resort to distraction
REPEAT: THERE ARE NO AGRICULTURIST RAINFORESTERS WITH TOWNS METALLURGY OR FARMING
THAT'S WHY YOU FAIL TO PRODUCE SUCH REFERENCES QUOTES OR CITATIONS THEN SWITCH TO SOMETHING IRRELEVANT HOPING ME AND OTHERS WILL FORGET THE ACTUAL POINT MADE AND 'PROOF' NEEDED FOR SUPPORT/CONFIRMATION. YOU CAN'T FALSIFY A THING I POSTED
YES A MYTHICAL FAMILY...What do Igbo and Berbers have in common? ALLLL of that is West Africa, and in just these two examples you have more genetic diversity than ALL of Europe... How they came into these regions are distinct from one another. Equating a GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION (i.e "West Africa) with one people and 'ONE BIG FAMILY" is almost juvenile in it's profound ignorance.
Now if you want to talk about the "Niger Congo" family, which West Africa is NOT completely comprised of then that is a different story. But you "We absolutely CANNOT BE FROM EGYPT" Goofies... don't WANT to have that conversation, because you KNOW where it would imply that this family once inhabited (Northeast Africa).
"THERE ARE NO AGRICULTURIST RAINFORESTERS WITH TOWNS OR METALLURGY THAT'S WHY YOU CAN'T PRODUCE ANY SUCH REFERENCE QUOTES OR CITATIONS"
Tukler what in the Hell are you even arguing here? "rainforesters" what are you talking about?
The Spread of Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa J. Desmond Clark The Journal of African History / Volume 3 / Issue 02 / July 1962, pp 211 - 228 DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700003042, Published online: 22 January 2009
There are stone tumulus graves in the western part of the Southern Sahara reminiscent of those built by the C Group peoples in Nubia and it would seem possible that this ethnic group was originally living in the southern fringes of the Sahara. If this is indeed the case, then they may be expected to have contributed to similar movements southwards into the West African Sudanic zone (as also into the Horn) about this time. These food-producing cultures occupied only a comparatively limited part of sub-Saharan Africa. In the greater part of the sub-continent the populations continued to live by hunting and gathering, and the degree of permanence of the settlement was dependent on the habitat and biome (fig. 2).
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I don't necessarily agree with this but this is from the J. Desmond Clark article referred to in the other article highlighted in yellow Reference is made here to sites Aouker and Hodh in Mauritania Map 2 says ?±2000 BC in the Sahelian area with the diagonal lines representing "Incipient cultivation and vegeculture"
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The First Farmers in Africa, the Cradle of Humanity David Baker, Macquarie University.
(excerpt)
Early West African farming methods are unique in many ways. They used crops only native to Africa. Scholars think that farming in West Africa was not copied from Egypt or the Fertile Crescent. It seems West Africa is another one of those regions that mysteriously started farming independently. In fact, West Africa started farming around the same time that farming began in the Americas. This was before it began in many other regions of the world. THE SPREAD OF AFRICAN AGRICULTURE (1000 BCE-500 CE) Sorghum and millet were the main crops of West Africans, who still herded cattle. This played a role in a great migration of farmers out of West Africa starting at approximately 1000 BCE. 'These migrants were the Bantu people. They spread farming across the rest of the continent. Some of them traveled along the fertile grasslands of the Sahel, a strip of land just below the Sahara. This was a path to East Africa. The Bantu arrived around 1000 BCE, bringing their farming methods with them.
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posted
"Sorghum and millet were the maincrops of West Africans, who still herded cattle"
My source actually gives an explanation as to how sub tropical crops replaced crops natural to Nigeria in the tropics, and were domesticated. This came from a society that had a history of working with the crop.
Not to mention there is clear proof of interaction between Nigeria and Kemet via cultural exchange.
I was looking at this article The Origins of Agriculture in West Africa by Oliver Davies Oliver Davies 1968 (from ORIGINS OF AFRICAN AGRICULTURE)
that you have at the bottom of the text image in the OP. However that text image does not correspond to the Oliver Davies article.
What is the source of your text image in the OP?
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Hard evidence for wheat or barley cultivation in West Africa would have to cite primary research discussing ancient evidence samples discovered and their dating
Also diffusion of a certain technology does not mean that people adopting that technology are the same people who first developed it They are just people learning a method of doing something and the method could be passed from tribe to tribe, nation to nation
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Fig. 1 - African "Male" kiln
Fig. 2 - African "Female" kiln 
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