Comments on the Thesis that there was a Major Centre of Plant Domestication Near the Headwaters of the River Niger

Abstract

In his book, Africa; its peoples and their culture history, ethnographer G. P. Murdock has undertaken a tremendous interpretive task based upon a survey of the literature. Of consequence here is his thesis that… agriculture was independently developed [at about 5000 B.C.] by the Negroes of West Africa. This was, moreover, a genuine invention, not a borrowing from another people. Furthermore, the assemblage of cultivated plants ennobled from wild forms in Negro Africa ranks as one of the four major agricultural complexes evolved in the entire course of human history … The invention of agriculture in Negro Africa is most probably to be credited to the Mande peoples around the headwaters of the Niger in the extreme western part of the Sudan, less than 1,000 miles from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.