African pastoral

Archaeologists have long believed that food production developed worldwide much the way it did in the Near East: as climate changes made wild grains less available, hunters and gatherers settled in villages and relatively quickly domesticated plants and then, over the next few thousand years, animals.

But recent genetic studies and excavations in Africa suggest that the patterns of domestication there were strikingly different. This new research, emerging in the last few years in academic books and articles, shows that in Africa, wild cattle were domesticated several thousand years before plants, and that farming and herding spread patchily and slowly across the continent.

Why Africans were relatively late to take up farming and where the domestication of wild grains first happened are now the subjects of intense research. One theory is that wild grain was so abundant throughout the continent that there was no need to settle down to farming. Already the new discoveries have caused archaeologists to adjust their thinking about how societies evolved and to realize how assumptions arose from concepts developed for the Near East, where most archaeological work has been done.

''African scholars kept expecting to find domestic plants very early because the model from the Near East was driving the thinking on Africa,'' said Dr. Fiona Marshall, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis who in a 2002 article in The Journal of World Prehistory was among the first to recognize that Africa followed a different paradigm. ''It took us a long time to see that we had a different pattern.''

•	African Pastoral Archaeologists Rewrite History of Farming The New York Times, Tuesday, July 27, 2004 Byline: Brenda Fowler