Abstract
The timing and extent of the adoption and exploitation of domesticates and their secondary products, across Holocene North Africa, has long been the subject of debate. The three distinct areas within the region, Mediterranean north Africa, the Nile Valley and the Sahara, each with extremely diverse environments and ecologies, demonstrate differing trajectories to pastoralism. Here, we address this question using a combination of faunal evidence and organic residue analyses of c. 300 archaeological vessels from sites in Algeria, Libya and Sudan. This synthesis of new and published data provides a broad regional and chronological perspective on the scale and intensity of domestic animal exploitation and the inception of dairying practices in Holocene North Africa. Following the introduction of domesticated animals into the region our results confirm a hiatus of around one thousand years before the adoption of a full pastoral economy, which appears first in the Libyan Sahara, at c. 5200 BCE, subsequently appearing at c. 4600 BCE in the Nile Valley and at 4400–3900 BCE in Mediterranean north Africa.
Highlights
A picture is beginning to emerge of the widespread importance of dairying in the subsistence economies of Neolithic people
The existence of pastoralism as an established and widespread way of life in Africa, instead of the adoption of farming, and long before the domestication of plants, has been very hard for scholars to accept despite it being clear that the Near East model of ‘Neolithisation’ does not fit the model for the development of African subsistence strategies, which were likely shaped by the unstable, marginal environments that early Holocene Saharan hunter-gatherers lived in
We present the results of a large-scale analysis of c. 300 potsherds from archaeological sites in Algeria (Gueldaman Cave), Libya (Takarkori rockshelter) and Sudan (Kadero), to produce a broad regional and chronological perspective on the uptake and subsequent intensification of dairy product exploitation across Holocene North Africa (Fig. 1aed)
Summary
A picture is beginning to emerge of the widespread importance of dairying in the subsistence economies of Neolithic people. A combination of faunal and biomolecular evidence presently suggests that, in some instances, the adoption of dairying often occurs concurrently with the exploitation of domesticates, such as cattle, sheep and goats, albeit on varying scales of intensity and depending on local environmental, economic and cultural settings (e.g. Evershed et al, 2008). In other cases, such as in the Libyan Sahara, there seems to be a gap of at least one thousand years between the appearance of the earliest domesticates and the inception of dairying practices (di Lernia, 2013). It is increasingly becoming clear that the adoption and occurrence of dairying may have been a piecemeal process developing in varying ways (Evershed et al, 2008; Dunne et al, 2012; Debono Spiteri et al, 2016). Chronological variation in the appearance, spread and intensification of the different innovations
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