A still-common perspective on African prehistory is that it started in a big way in terms of human evolution, but then faded during the Holocene in competition with the rest of the world created by its many successful emigrants into Eurasia and eventually Australia and the Americas. Egypt normally escapes this fate by being treated as a world unto itself. I hope in the previous discussions of Africa, in Chapters 5 and 7, as well as in this chapter, that this continent comes through instead as a region of remarkable Holocene migratory activity.
To recap the main developments, we witnessed first the hunter-gatherer colonization of an early Holocene greening Sahara, devoid of human life until after 10,000 bc. Then, Africa's first firmly attested food production was introduced around 6000 bc, by immigrant Afroasiatic speakers from the Levant. This led ultimately to the rise of Egyptian civilization, to a contemporary spread of pastoralism around the fringes of a rapidly drying mid-Holocene Sahara, and to the development of agriculture in the Ethiopian highlands. Nilo-Saharan populations apparently (the evidence is mostly linguistic) adopted pastoralism from Afroasiatic speakers and some migrated south into Uganda and Kenya. As the desert became less habitable after 4000 bc, populations along the Sahel and savanna fringes of the Sahara took the first steps towards developing indigenous African agriculture, a product of the summer monsoon pattern of rainfall. The resulting spread of Niger-Congo-speaking farmers was probably just commencing by 2500 bc, and by 500 bc the greatest migration in recent African prehistory, that of the Bantu speakers, was heading south. By ad 300, the Bantu had spread over 3000 km, from Lake Victoria to Natal.
All of Africa was affected by these movements, even the southern hunters and gatherers, some of whom adopted sheep herding about 2000 years ago and many of whom much later lost their lands to Bantu farmers. The Pygmies of the rainforest adopted Niger-Congo languages. While the Khoe-San hunters of the Kalahari are often stated to be the only ones to have retained the genomes, languages, and material lifestyles of their ancestors via an unbroken line of local inheritance that goes back into the Pleistocene, there are some who also doubt this.18 Perhaps few populations can live in a state of total isolation for over 10,000 years.
While Afroasiatic populations introduced agriculture and animal husbandry to northeastern Africa, they did not spread very far to the south of the Sahara. As in Asia, where the winter rainfall to monsoon climatic divide kept western and eastern Eurasians apart for several millennia (and still does so today), so also in Africa the fluctuating northern boundary of the African monsoon kept apart Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo speaking populations. Nilo-Saharans straddled the boundary, and the Ethiopian highlands were environmentally unique enough to go their own way, just like New Guinea within the Indo-Pacific region. The monsoon boundary was perhaps the greatest environmental determinant of African agricultural history, backed of course in the north by the mighty Sahara, the gateway into the continent from all regions north or east, except for seaborne visitors such as Austronesians.
World History
