In a transitional age: Africa, 12,700-9500 bcb

Around 12,700 bcb another major global climatic shift, with repercussions in Africa, began - a period of climatic amelioration, the Bolling-Allerod Inter­stadial, marked by the warming of global climates and by increased rainfall in many parts of the continent.

Varieties of change, 12,700-9500 bce

Nearly everywhere, the shift to wetter and warmer climates at the begin­ning of the interstadial seems to have stimulated significant change in culture as well as population movements and cultural replacement. In some cases the shifts in livelihood or culture were regional in their reach. In at least one case, the changes in population and culture spread trans- regionally into far-distant lands.

In East Africa a new culture, Eburran, adapted especially to the expanded montane forest-grassland ecotone areas of that time, took shape in the highland areas of modern-day Kenya. The subsistence strategies of this cultural tradition must have been highly efficient and adaptable, because the tradition in modified forms persisted, despite subsequent climatic changes and other historical challenges, down through the Holocene.^[492]

In southern Africa, where the climatic effects were less marked, cultural continuity from the Glacial Maximum into the interstadial tended to be the general outcome.

In the areas between the middle Nile and the Ethiopian highlands, the warmer temperatures and increased rainfall during the interstadial encour­aged the movement of early Nilo-Saharan speakers outward into new envir­onments. Three cultural groupings of Nilo-Saharan speakers had taken shape by this era. The earliest Koman peoples, judging from the linguistic evidence for their early locations, established themselves more widely in this era in several areas immediately along the eastern edges of the highlands and between there and the White Nile in South Sudan. The most probable locations of a second set of communities, the early Central Sudanians, would have been the riverine areas along and west of the Nile in South Sudan. A third set of communities, ancestral to the later Northern Sudanian peoples of the early Holocene, moved northward into areas newly reclaimed from desert by the climatic amelioration of that period.

Farther north along the Nile, extraordinarily high Nile flood levels accom­panied the onset of the initial, B0lling phase of the B0lling-Aller0d Intersta­dial and continued from around 12,700 to 11,800 bce. The very high annual floods of this period washed away the evidence of human occupation close to the river, and they may also have discouraged people for several centuries from utilizing many of those environments. Archaeological evidence again becomes plentiful once this period is past, and it shows that several cultural shifts were underway by that time. By ιι,000-10,000 bce three broadly similar cultures - Shamarkian in Lower Nubia, Elkabian in Upper Egypt, and Qurunian in the Fayum - had replaced the Isnan and other cultures of the previous period.

In the Maghreb and in northern Libya, the Oranian tradition persisted through the climatic shifts, lasting down to at least the close of the Younger Dryas Stadial. Then, from around 8500 bce, a new complex, the Capsian, took hold over large areas of North Africa. A new human population appears to have spread with this cultural replacement, mixing with the earlier populations who had made the Oranian. A newly important pursuit in the economy of the Capsian complex was the collection of wild grains, already long practiced along the Nile and anciently associated with peoples of the Afrasian language family.^[495] This economic changeover suggests that a key factor in the establishment of the Capsian tradition was a westward spread of Afrasian speakers into Libya and the Maghreb. The Capsian communities, it can be proposed, most likely adopted languages belonging to the same branch of the Afrasian family as the more recent Berber languages of those regions. This branch also includes the Chadic languages, which are spoken today on the other side of the Sahara, in Niger and in northern Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad.^[496]

West Africa, 12,700-9500 bce: cultural and human replacement

On the other side of the continent, in West Africa, Middle Stone Age indus­tries, using prepared-core techniques, and their archaic human makers still prevailed apparently everywhere down to the close of the Last Glacial Maximum, 13,000-12,000 bce, from Senegal to Ghana and Nigeria. And then, in perhaps no more than 2,000 years, between around 13,000 and 11,000 bce, the Middle Stone Age populations and their tools disappeared, replaced by different varieties of the fully Later Stone Age, West African Microlithic complex.

But where were these new people intrusive from? The languages of West Africa from 12,000 to 11,000 bce onward belonged, as far as can be told, to the Western branch of the Niger-Kordofanian family. The limited extent of the other, equally complex primary branch of the family, Kordofanian, to areas just north of South Sudan today, indicates that the Western Niger- Kordofanian languages were carried to West Africa via a long-extended expansion of people westward from South Sudan. Virtually no archaeological work exists as yet for nearly all the crucial intervening regions - from western South Sudan, through the Central African Republic, to eastern Cameroon. Did this expansion proceed over extended stages westward during the later parts of the Last Glacial Maximum, or was it a rapid dispersal at the onset of the B0lling-Aller0d Interstadial, encouraged by the northward expansion of favorable savanna and woodland into those intervening lands? Those are questions we cannot yet answer.

Religious beliefs among the early Western Niger-Kordofanian societies, by the time of their movements into West Africa, may already have begun to evolve in a quite different direction from the belief systems of other regions of the continent, including among the related Kordofanian peoples of Sudan. It seems probable that the primary focus of religious observance around 9500 bce in the proto-Niger-Congo daughter society of the early Western Niger-Kordofanians was the ancestral spirits of the clan or lineage community.

as 9500 bce.

From what little archaeology we have, the early Western Niger- Kordofanians in West Africa appear to have favored neither heavy rainforest nor dry savanna and steppe, but rather intermediate zones of woodland and well-watered savanna. This choice of environments may help to explain why one Western Niger-Kordofanian people embarked on a crucial leap forward in technology and subsistence sometime before 9500 bce. The onset of the Younger Dryas around 10,800 bce changed many of the areas settled by Western Kordofanians from relatively well-watered savanna into much drier savanna or steppe, forcing the inhabitants to either follow the retreating rainfall belts south or adopt new strategies for exploiting their now drier environments.

Facing that challenge, one particular group of Western Niger-Kordofanian communities, speakers of the proto-Niger-Congo language, adopted two mut­ually reinforcing innovations. They began to harvest several of the wild-grain species, such as fonio, that grew in abundance after the rains in the steppe grasslands and drier savannas. At the same time they independently invented

53 Ehret, Civilizations of Africa, chap. 3; also Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), chap. 5. ceramic technology and applied the new technology in fashioning pots in which they cooked their grains whole.^[498] When the Younger Dryas ended and the Holocene era began around 9600-9500 bce, the belts of steppe and dry savanna advanced northward again toward the Sahara.

The earliest direct testimony yet available for this transformation comes from sites dating to before 9400 bce, located along the Bandiagara escarp­ment in the modern-day country of Mali, in just the areas into which dry savanna and steppe environments spread around 9600-9500 bce, at the end of the Younger Dryas.^[499] By that time this economy and its technology already had a history. Its earlier stages would have taken place in the immediately preceding Young Dryas period; and because the lands around the Bandiagara escarpment appear to have been uninhabited desert during the Younger Dryas, these new developments must have come into being farther south.

The linguistic evidence suggests that still another innovative development - not self-evident in the archaeology - may have been underway among the Niger-Congo grain collectors as early as the later tenth and the ninth millennia bce. Several verb roots for the deliberate tending and protecting of food plants can be provisionally reconstructed to the era in Niger-Congo linguistic history immediately following the proto-Niger-Congo period, and one such verb possibly back to proto-Niger-Congo itself. The early descendant soci­eties of the proto-Niger-Congo people, this evidence indicates, were inde­pendently taking the first steps toward agriculture in the early Holocene, by engaging in pre-domestication cultivation.^[500] On the other side of the continent, the first steps toward food production came as early as the ninth and eighth millennia bce, when Nilo-Saharan peoples in the eastern Sahara initiated the earliest herding of cattle in world history. These same peoples probably not much later began also to engage in pre-domestication cultivation - with probably gourds and melons and then grains as the early crops.^[501]

In other words, Africa at the beginning of the Holocene was not a place apart. The same trajectories of human change were emerging in Africa as in several other parts of the world - toward agricultural ways of life and, much farther off in time, toward more complex and more unequal societies.