Multi-stage dispersal of Southwest Asian domestic livestock and the path of pastoralism in the Middle Nile Valley

Abstract

Herding was the most suitable form of food production that Middle Nilotic populations relied on for a long time before crop cultivation. When domestic livestock reached the Middle Nile Valley, in present Sudan's Upper Nubia, which is some 1500 km upstream of the Nile Delta, their domestication process had long been accomplished elsewhere. As the slow and gradual process of wild animal taming did not regard the populations living there, the shift from foraging to the adoption of food production could have – theoretically and technically – been immediate. Some early Pastoral Neolithic sites in the Middle Nile Valley have been interpreted as the evidence of such an abrupt change, indicating an almost total replacement of previous wild species by domestic livestock in the faunal composition of their subsistence economies. However, new radiocarbon dates, archaeozoological evidence, and archaeological investigations on Pre-Pastoral and Pastoral settlement systems have shown that, even in this region, the switch from foraging to pastoralism followed a lengthy multi-stage path, rather than a geographically progressing, systematic diffusion. This paper proposes a non-consecutive multi-stage adoption of livestock rearing, including: (1) Contemporary settlements of hunter-gatherers and herders in the same areas; (2) Hunter-gatherers adopting a few domestic animals with no visible cultural changes; (3) Early herders of a few domestic animals with some, but not all, visible cultural changes; and (4) Full nomadic pastoralists.