posted
"Ginja, C., Guimarães, S., Da Fonseca, R. R., Rasteiro, R., Rodríguez-Varela, R., Simões, L. G., ... & Valenzuela-Lamas, S. Genomic Analyses of Iron Age Cattle Specimens from Althiburos, Tunisia, Support an Independent and Local Origin of African Taurine Cattle in the Maghreb."
A pre-print study showing that ancient Numidian cattle was closely related to N'Dama African cattle in West Africa, supporting the Maghreb as an independent center of cattle domestication.
Posts: 288 | From: Asia | Registered: Mar 2016
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Nice finding thanks and that althiburos site is very interesting giving us also evidence of urban settlements, viticulture and ironworking outside of any foreign influence.
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Where's the graph? PhotoBucket is restricted.
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Is there any synthesis between all these African cattle papers? Haven't done a side by side comparison but off the top of my head they seem out of kilter with each other.
I question "independent" Maghreb domestication as late as the Iron Age. AE conquests records list cattle booty taken from nearby Libyans. How are or what is the relationship between the cattle confiscated from Bronze Sirtean North Africa and these supposed independently domesticated ones from Iron Maghreb North Africa?
Not too long ago an article came out declaring mid-Nile husbandry in Sudan was carried there out of 'coastal' North Africa. Amazing it could work its way across Mediterranean Africa up the Nile among non-linguistically related peoples but was inept at spreading to the adjacent Maghreb with speakers of the same phylum. Similarly Gurke et al (2021) offer "that by about 4000 BP, domestic cattle had arrived in the north of Spain".
So if domesticated were east south and north of Iron Age Maghreb how could husbandry be independent there as if they never saw cows from the mentioned cow associated peoples.
Afaik, there's no field consensus that a new article overturns previous ones and negate the work of larger research teams. But I've noticed on ES for years now that members react as if the latest article supersedes all previous ones.
What happened to article analysis and trying to synthesize information from various subject matter related articles?
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: Where's the graph? PhotoBucket is restricted.
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Is there any synthesis between all these African cattle papers? Haven't done a side by side comparison but off the top of my head they seem out of kilter with each other.
I question "independent" Maghreb domestication as late as the Iron Age. AE conquests records list cattle booty taken from nearby Libyans. How are or what is the relationship between the cattle confiscated from Bronze Sirtean North Africa and these supposed independently domesticated ones from Iron Maghreb North Africa?
I doubt that these late dates are proof that the site in and of itself is a center of independent domestication. The Libyan Sahara remains the most convincing and oldest region for animal domestication in NW Africa (or attempts at doing so) - - 9,000- 7.500 BP years. See "Taming barbary sheep: Wild animal management by Early Holocene hunter-gatherers at Uan Afuda (Libyan Sahara)" Savino Di Lernia (1996). Eastern Africa Nubia is most likely a second and independent center.
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: Are the below Prendergast dates now wrong?
Not too long ago an article came out declaring mid-Nile husbandry in Sudan was carried there out of 'coastal' North Africa. Amazing it could work its way across Mediterranean Africa up the Nile among non-linguistically related peoples but was inept at spreading to the adjacent Maghreb with speakers of the same phylum. Similarly Gurke et al (2021) offer "that by about 4000 BP, domestic cattle had arrived in the north of Spain".
So if domesticated were east south and north of Iron Age Maghreb how could husbandry be independent there as if they never saw cows from the mentioned cow associated peoples.
Afaik, there's no field consensus that a new article overturns previous ones and negate the work of larger research teams. But I've noticed on ES for years now that members react as if the latest article supersedes all previous ones.
What happened to article analysis and trying to synthesize information from various subject matter related articles?
The dates are not wrong, but the debate has always been whether or not cattle in Africa were independently domesticated. The study shows that this African cattle genome shares pre-domesticated ancestry with European aurochs while showing that modern domesticated African cattle are almost wholly descended (or rather related) from this species of cattle. Even with the oldest dates for domesticated cattle, the mostly Western researchers always come up with a garbled explanation of Eurasian origin, while never providing evidence. The genetic link between modern African cattle and this ancient sample at the exclusion of Levant cattle species supports the case of local domestication.
Posts: 288 | From: Asia | Registered: Mar 2016
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Hey MansaMusa you Cattle Master (nah, won't call you Bororo).
This seems your expertise and so I'm relying on you for the nonce.
Do you see any precedence for Cult style Beeve management/domestication 'originating' in Çayönü Tepesi and Çatalhöyük then 'spreading' to Nile Valley Africa before appearing cultless in Mediterranean North Africa and of much reduced cult Tropical North Africa.
It seems full blown cult is limited to Sudan. Masai and other herdsmen in Kenya and taNzania and eastern to southern baNtu seemingly have little to no cult, just culture.
If you see that, why do you think deep cattle cult is Sudan nilo-centric?
Not to burden you more, heh heh heh, but did Anatolia have cult or just 'trophy' heads and Leaping as in the Aegean millennia later?
Thx 4 yr time.
BTW The Ginja pre-print Abstract seems reasonable enough and ties Althiburos to Maroc's pre-dom Aurochs and Guinea's current N'Dama breed. Any reason 7400 yr old Grotte Capeletti is left out?
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: Hey MansaMusa you Cattle Master (nah, won't call you Bororo).
This seems your expertise and so I'm relying on you for the nonce.
Do you see any precedence for Cult style Beeve management/domestication 'originating' in Çayönü Tepesi and Çatalhöyük then 'spreading' to Nile Valley Africa before appearing cultless in Mediterranean North Africa and of much reduced cult Tropical North Africa.
It seems full blown cult is limited to Sudan. Masai and other herdsmen in Kenya and taNzania and eastern to southern baNtu seemingly have little to no cult, just culture.
If you see that, why do you think deep cattle cult is Sudan nilo-centric?
Not to burden you more, heh heh heh, but did Anatolia have cult or just 'trophy' heads and Leaping as in the Aegean millennia later?
Thx 4 yr time.
BTW The Ginja pre-print Abstract seems reasonable enough and ties Althiburos to Maroc's pre-dom Aurochs and Guinea's current N'Dama breed. Any reason 7400 yr old Grotte Capeletti is left out?
Lol. Am hardly an expert, and I know little about Cattle development outside of Africa.
"Cult style Beeve management/domestication 'originating' in Çayönü Tepesi and Çatalhöyük then 'spreading' to Nile Valley Africa before appearing cultless in Mediterranean North Africa and of much reduced cult Tropical North Africa" has never had much evidence supporting it. The evidence from Nabta Playa and the like as fragmented as it was always supported independent domestication. Arguments against independent domestication relied on discrediting early African dates and supposing that earlier Eurasian dates meant that cattle originated there, with the proponents of these theories neglecting to explain how that spread occurred.
I think Achilles Gautier, the cattle research expert that Wendorf relied on for his Nabta Playa analysis explained that the controversy around cattle domestication is fuelled by Anglo-American researchers who are absolutely ignorant about the standards of research from other cultures such as French academic culture.
He was talking about the obsession with criticizing the fact that remains from Nabta Playa were not the same size as expected of domesticated cattle when such a difference would have no value in prehistory in the first stages of domestication of wild animals. The first domesticated animals would obviously have been wild cattle who had not yet developed domestic traits that would take a few centuries.
The African cattle cultural complex as far as I am aware is unique to Africa.
Since Sudan is most likely the first place in Africa or the world probably to domesticate cattle, the cult-like characteristics for some reason are better preserved among the Nilotic cultures there.
"BTW The Ginja pre-print Abstract seems reasonable enough and ties Althiburos to Maroc's pre-dom Aurochs and Guinea's current N'Dama breed. Any reason 7400 yr old Grotte Capeletti is left out?"
Researchers often live in their own bubbles. They may simply be unaware of the study. aDNA scientists, as we should know by now, are often historically and archaeologically illiterates.
In any event, the researchers used cattle teeth to extract DNA. I am not sure why we have a lack of aDNA samples from Nubia/Sudan, considering the massive Kerma and 25th Dynasty burials with hundreds of cattle heads.
Posts: 288 | From: Asia | Registered: Mar 2016
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The obvious truth is these researchers have their own a priori models and are trying to force the data into those models no matter what. The French were the colonial power of North West Africa and thus have been the ones developing this historiography of the Maghreb separate from the rest of Africa. As if it was a separate continent and developed its language and culture independent from Africans and only had connections to Eurasia. Meanwhile other Europeans are studying the Sahel and Upper Nile where they are modeling the spread of cattle into "sub Saharan" Africa. And the findings are challenging this idea that North Africa is separate from the rest of Africa or that innovations in agriculture were also simply imports.
If you really want to go further than that the actual issue is two basic models of human cognitive and developmental evolution related to agriculture and civilization. One model assumes agriculture and civilization just magically popped up one day in humans 5,000 years ago. The other model says these things did not just pop up out of nowhere and are related to thousands of years of evolution. This applies to Africa because it would have been the location of a lot of the evolutionary steps related to the eventual rise of agriculture. That means various attempts to cultivate wild grains as part of thousands of years of hunting and gathering and learning to identify different plant species and which are useful and which arent. This also relates to civilization in the same way. So when ancient sites are found showing transitional evolution from wild harvesting and wild cultivation of grains and domestication of wild animals they disregard them. Because they assume a "sudden arrival" of agriculture from outside sources, they are only generally looking for evidence to fit that model. Which means ignoring all the evidence of this slow evolution and transition from one to the other. These people keep searching for and promoting fantastical ideas about civilizations and agriculture practices that just "popped up" like magically and not the reality of long slow evolution through trial and error over time.
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