A Re-Examination of the Evidence for Agricultural Origins in the Nile Valley

Abstract

AbstractCurrent belief ascribes the origins of agriculture in the Nile to diffusion in the fifth millennium B.C. from southwest Asia of plants and animals the domestication of which had first begun there in the eighth millennium or earlier. A growing body of evidence is now becoming available which shows the cultural pattern in the Nile Valley at the termination of the Pleistocene to have been appreciably more complex than was previously thought and necessitates a re-examination of the evidence on which the belief for the late appearance of domestication in Egypt is based. This pre-agricultural complexity, when examined in the light of the abundant historical and ethnographic evidence for distinctive man/animal, if not also man/plant relationships in north and northeast Africa, suggests that a process of pre-adaption using the local animal and plant resources is most likely to have preceded the introduction of the Asian domesticates. Many of the indigenous practices relating to local animals and plants persisted as late as Middle Kingdom times (2052–1786 B.C.). The appearance of the Asian food plants and animals in the fifth millennium may reflect, therefore, not the beginnings of domestication in Egypt, but the replacement of genetically less suitable local species by more satisfactory, exotic forms, a situation made possible by the beginnings of regular communication between the Nile and the Levant from that time onwards.