...
Post A Reply
my profile
|
directory
login
|
register
|
search
|
faq
|
forum home
»
EgyptSearch Forums
»
Egyptology
»
Pyramid positions solved
» Post A Reply
Post A Reply
Login Name:
Password:
Message Icon:
Message:
HTML is not enabled.
UBB Code™ is enabled.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by MindoverMatter718: [QB] [b]Oknaw, [URL=http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=000037;p=1#000000]read[/URL] and learn....[/b] [IMG]http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/africa/kingdoms.jpg[/IMG] http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/2.1/ehret.html Ehret: [b]There are at least seven or eight maybe eleven to thirteen world regions which independently invented agriculture. None in Europe, by the way.[/b] One, of course, is in the Middle East, and many people still believe that this was the first, from which all the others developed. The idea of diffusion from the Middle East still lingers. That idea really can't be sustained. You have, for instance, one independent invention of agriculture in East Asia, maybe two. You have it more widely accepted now that there's an independent invention of agriculture in the interior of New Guinea. People argue about what to make of the Indian materials, but certainly India saw one of the three separate domestications of cattle; there are enough uniquely Indian crops that we might end up with India as another center of independent agricultural innovation. There are different ideas about the Americas, but I think we have two for sure: Mesoamerica and the Andes. There may also be a separate lowland tropical South American development. It also seems that there might be a few things domesticated in the southeastern United States even before there was Mesoamerican stimulus or diffusion. So that makes four. [b]Here's the point: agriculture was invented in Africa in at least three centers, and maybe even four.[/b] In Africa, you find the earliest domestication of cattle. The location, the pottery and other materials we've found makes it likely that happened among the Nilo-Saharan peoples, the sites are in southern Egypt. There is an exceptionally strong correlation between archaeology and language on this issue. A separate or distinct agriculture arose in West Africa around yams. A third takes place in southeastern or southern Ethiopia. I've got a student working this year in Ethiopia to see whether we can pin this down more precisely. The Ethiopians domesticated a plant called enset. It's very unique: Ethiopians use the lower stem and the bulb; not the tuber, the fruit, or the greens. Enset grows in a climatic zone distinct from that where cattle were first domesticated; that was further north. The possible fourth area of agricultural invention would involve people who cultivated grain in Ethiopia. They seem to have begun cultivation of grain independently, but adopted cattle from the Nilo-Saharans of the middle Nile region. To pin this down, we need archaeology from a whole big area, but so far it's missing. There's another really interesting innovation in Africa: pottery. There are two places in the world which develop pottery really early. One is Japan, where you find pottery before 10,000 BCE, going back to at least 11,000 or 12,000 BCE. And then you've got pottery by 10,500 BCE in the eastern Sahara, and it spreads widely in the southern Sahara. Unlike the Middle Eastern ceramics, where you can see the development of pottery at every stage, the stuff we find in the southern Sahara is already great pottery. So there's probably 500 years we're missing from the archaeological record. So let's say that pottery develops in the southern Sahara 2,500 years before Middle Eastern pottery. The Middle Eastern stuff does look like it was developed independently of the African, but hey, this is really interesting! Africa is not too far away; there may have been some diffusion. So, in a world history class, I would be talking about the development of agriculture in all the different parts of the world. I'd look at how people developed different kinds of agriculture in response to their particular environmental or demographic challenges. Then I'd look at the independent invention of pottery. In the Japanese case, it's not even connected with agriculture. One could argue that it turns up with cattle-keeping in the Sahara, but it also turns up with people who don't keep cattle, for fishing. So you can open up people's minds to technology: [/QB][/QUOTE]
Instant Graemlins
Instant UBB Code™
What is UBB Code™?
Options
Disable Graemlins in this post.
*** Click here to review this topic. ***
Contact Us
|
EgyptSearch!
(c) 2015 EgyptSearch.com
Powered by UBB.classic™ 6.7.3