Pastoral pathways to plant domestication: current evidence for African pearl millet and sorghum in comparative perspective

Summary

Recent archaeobotanical evidence has provided important, although limited evidence, for the steps on the domestication trajectory for Pearl Millet in western Africa (Mali, Mauretania) and Sorghum in eastern Africa (Sudan), during the middle Holocene (3000-1000 BC). Both were exploited by and domesticated by societies that in the Sahelian and northern Savannas, and practiced mobile herding alongside hunting and low-level cultivation, but full-scale agricultural dependence may not have emerged until after 1000 BC. While these data can fit a protracted domestication process like that known for other cereals, we will argue that the particularly mobile form of early cultivation may have promoted a somewhat faster selection of non-shattering but with less marked selection for large grain size, and differing developments in the cultural evolution of crop-processing and storage, that were more expedient to mobility. Domesticated cereals, however, provided the basis for the development of sedentary village societies, demographic increase, full agriculture, and free-threshing cereal varieties. These particular pathways suggest parallel processes and similar causative processes to savannah transitions elsewhere, such as mid-Holocene Western and Southern India.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• New Perspectives on Agricultural Origins

Keywords

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