Resisters, Vacillators or Laggards? Reconsidering the First Farmer-Herders in Prehistoric Egypt

Abstract

This article discusses the diffusion of food production from the Levant to Egypt in the Early–Middle Holocene. It attempts to explain how the diffusion and adoption of food production occurred in Egypt in light of optimal foraging theory, niche construction theory and innovation diffusion models. It disputes an old argument that Southwest Asian domesticates appeared late in Egypt and played only a minor role in its inhabitants’ subsistence. The primary focus is on the Fayum in northern Egypt, where the earliest-dated Southwest Asian domesticated cereal remains in Egypt were found together with cultivation-related tools and facilities. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the beginning of food production in the Fayum was not as late as previously thought, and that the subsequent development of food production should be seen as a response to the increasing imbalance between the growing human population and the limited wild food resources available in the Middle Holocene. Lithic evidence strongly indicates that people in the Fayum exerted every possible effort to make food production feasible and efficient with the aid of technology in the course of a millennium, starting in the early-to-mid 6th millennium BC.