But people who do world history usually begin with the origins of agriculture. There are at least seven or eight ­ maybe eleven to thirteen ­ world regions which independently invented agriculture. None in Europe, by the way. 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.
Here's the point: agriculture was invented in Africa in at least three centers, and maybe even four. 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.
World History Connected | Vol. 2 No. 1 | Christopher Ehret: "Christopher Ehret"
