African rice domesticated in fourth millennium BC

[leopard9]

They could, although rubber has only limited usefulness without vulcanization or some other curing method. The Mesoamericans cured rubber with the juice of another naive plant; would there be anything suitable that West Africans could use?

If rubber harvesting does catch on, it would happen in the Lower Niger and Congo rather than *Mali. It would also, unfortunately, cement a slave society in those regions; one constant about wild-rubber harvesting is that it's nasty labor that few would do voluntarily for pre-industrial wages.



Hmmm. This process would be well under way by the time a book-religion gets started; writing and centralization would be ~1500 years old by then, and syncretization of village deities might have progressed somewhat like ancient Egypt. The book-religion will, as you say, add a new layer and also increase the drive for systematization. India and China might be good analogues; another person off-list has suggested Buddhism in Japan as a model.

_______
​

Anyway, a few more stray thoughts about the *Malian calendar and agriculture (which in any ancient society are closely intertwined): I doubt that the solstices and equinoxes will be very important to the *Malian year - the difference between the longest and shortest days at that latitude is only about an hour and 20 minutes, and crops depend on flood cycles rather than temperature cycles. Instead, the new year is likely to be celebrated in September when the floods begin, followed by a planting festival in October and a rice-harvest festival in February.

Between February and September, there's time for another growing season, but there probably isn't enough floodwater left for a second rice crop or anything else water-intensive. Maybe they'd learn to cultivate bambara beans as an intercrop - it's a relatively low-water crop that could be planted in April using reserved water from the rice paddies, eked out with the summer rains, and harvested in August before the next flood. Legumes are also good for nitrogen-fixing, so the beans could replenish the soil for the next rice crop, with the silt laid down by the annual floods also ensuring continued fertility. They'd have to breed a variety more tolerant of wet soils if they want to grow these beans in fallow rice paddies, but this seems like a manageable task compared to what the Mesoamericans did with maize.

The areas further from the river, where floodwaters aren't as high and irrigation is harder, are where they'd grow millet and yams. Vegetables could be grown as secondary crops in both zones, and date palms and fruit trees on the high ground. I'd guess that, based on the 3900-3700 date I set earlier for rice domestication, the full crop package would exist by the early third millennium (3000-2700), supplemented by sheep and goat's milk, microlivestock, and later by fish and waterfowl culture in the rice paddies.

Okay, I'm really interested to see how they'll be doing a few centuries down the line then. I suppose this culture will have at least a few similarities to East Asian political culture with a highly centralized government. Have cows or horses reached the Niger River region yet and if so, will there be any sleeping sickness resistant breeds down the line?

Man, your worldbuilding is excellent! How do you do it?

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Okay, I'm really interested to see how they'll be doing a few centuries down the line then. I suppose this culture will have at least a few similarities to East Asian political culture with a highly centralized government. Have cows or horses reached the Niger River region yet and if so, will there be any sleeping sickness resistant breeds down the line?

The Inner Niger Delta is north of the tsetse-fly line, where cattle and horses have always been able to survive and where horse cultures have existed IOTL from the Nok onward. The *Malians would have sheep and goats from the beginning - they were herded by Saharan tribes in the sixth millennium and would be brought to *Mali from that direction - with cattle making an appearance around the early third millennium and horses arriving from Egypt late in the second.

Whether horses can spread to the daughter cultures below 8-10 degrees north latitude would depend on a breed that can resist sleeping sickness, which never happened IOTL despite the obvious advantages.

As to your other question, I've mentioned in previous posts that the *Malians do become steadily more centralized and hierarchical during their Bronze Age, as happened with Bronze Age cultures elsewhere in the world. Large-scale public works and palace economies will do that. On the other hand, *Malian culture does have some fairly strong counter-hierarchical tendencies, and these will have a rebirth after the Bronze Age collapse, which is one of the things that might factor into Axial Age religions.

Anyway, to continue my practice of jumping around in time, I think the next story will be much later and along the Atlantic coast: the sixth century BC, new religions, trading colonies and Carthaginians.

 

[Sulemain]

And maybe even Greeks and Etruscans?

 

[yboxman]

On the other hand, *Malian culture does have some fairly strong counter-hierarchical tendencies, and these will have a rebirth after the Bronze Age collapse, which is one of the things that might factor into Axial Age religions.

Is this analogous to the Middle East/East Med Bronze Dark ages? I'm wondering whether the drivers for this analogy would actually exist in upper Niger. Infinite Resevoirs of grasslands producing highly mobile nomadic horse riding nomads (not to mention the sea people) seem to be more limited relative to the cultivated area in the Sahel.

Anyway, to continue my practice of jumping around in time, I think the next story will be much later and along the Atlantic coast: the sixth century BC, new religions, trading colonies and Carthaginians.

Hurray!

 

[bob22]

New Lurker

This worldbuilding is truly fantastic Jonathan! One thing that occurred to me
when reading the village snippit is that, even by the standards of other
cultures of equivalent technology, *Mali is going to be jaded as hell
in regard to childhood death. With the apocalyptic undertones, punisher nurgle,
and significance of speech in *Mali culture, would kids be the opposite of the plague slaves i.e. being everywhere but vaguely despised by their elders? Until they are out of the highest chance of death and can speak sensibly, of course.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

And maybe even Greeks and Etruscans?

Iberians, certainly. The Greek and Etruscan interests probably lie more in the Eastern Mediterranean, but you never know.

Is this analogous to the Middle East/East Med Bronze Dark ages? I'm wondering whether the drivers for this analogy would actually exist in upper Niger. Infinite Resevoirs of grasslands producing highly mobile nomadic horse riding nomads (not to mention the sea people) seem to be more limited relative to the cultivated area in the Sahel.

There were cavalry empires in the Sahel IOTL, though, and the region wasn't as dry in ancient times as it is today, so there would be more pastureland for nomadic tribes to inhabit. The ancient Sahel would have no shortage of pastoralists who could do what the Fulani did later. Not to mention that the shift from a palace-based economy depending on long-distance trade to an early market economy that favors local production would be disruptive in itself. The dislocation in *Mali might not be as extreme as in the Near East of OTL, but I think it would be significant.

One thing that occurred to me when reading the village snippit is that, even by the standards of other cultures of equivalent technology, *Mali is going to be jaded as hell in regard to childhood death. With the apocalyptic undertones, punisher nurgle, and significance of speech in *Mali culture, would kids be the opposite of the plague slaves i.e. being everywhere but vaguely despised by their elders? Until they are out of the highest chance of death and can speak sensibly, of course.

Interesting thought. I tend to think that humans are hardwired to love and protect their children, and historically, children have been cherished even in societies with high infant mortality. The stereotype of ancient and medieval parents as callous toward their children has, as far as I can tell, been discredited; descriptions of parental love are a near-constant in historical poetry, and one of the most common reasons medieval European women sought counseling from priests was grief over a child's death. I don't think the *Malians would be incredibly different in this regard, although the knowledge that most of their children won't survive (I'm guessing they'd be on the high end of the 30 to 50 percent child mortality rate in premodern societies) is likely to affect them and add an undertone of grief to their literature.

I wonder, also, if they'd treat the cries of infants as incipient speech; cries are meaningful, after all, and babies usually progress to their first actual words within a year. I do suspect that they'd have a concept roughly equivalent to the Catholic age of reason, measured from when children can talk coherently.

 

[Mr.brightside]

It's not an exact correlation. But basically, you have a situation of auto-domestication. If human activities contribute to an increased local food supply then animals will start to hang around and be habituated to human presence. A steady wild population which is human tolerant in the area can lead to domestication if the animal turns out to have economically useful qualities.

It's most obvious with cats, dogs and pigs. Basically, humans were a breeding ground for mice - ergo cats. We produced a lot of edible garbage, ergo pigs and dogs.

I don't think it's a coincidence that after we evolved a grain/grass based agriculture, that we acquired grass/grazer based domesticates in the form of sheep, cattle, horses.

That said, we've had domestications without agriculture, most notably dogs and African cattle.

And we've had agriculture without a lot of significant animal domestications - the mesoamericans never really came up with a labour domesticate.

Microlivestocks seem to be relatively easy to domesticate - guineau pigs, turkey, chicken, hutia, geese, rabbits, etc. etc.

Okay, I can go along with that.



My impression is that barbarian invasions seem tied to climactic shifts, rather than the relative balance of technology. Basically, Barbarians are much more mobile, but much more thinly distributed normally. So it's usually a matter of a climactic factor which gets Barbarians concentrating to a point of local numerical superiority. Then the dominos start.

I meet a geologist last who went to Mongolia to collect tree ring cores. From the rings he speculated that the invasions happened after very productive years. Makes sense. During such climatic good times the population grows to unstable levels. When the climate gets less productive, there is incentive to look elsewhere.

 

[chr92]

I meet a geologist last who went to Mongolia to collect tree ring cores. From the rings he speculated that the invasions happened after very productive years. Makes sense. During such climatic good times the population grows to unstable levels. When the climate gets less productive, there is incentive to look elsewhere.

Paul Colinvaux has that in 'Fate of Nations', a well written and otherwise reccable book.

 

[Simreeve]

I meet a geologist last who went to Mongolia to collect tree ring cores. From the rings he speculated that the invasions happened after very productive years. Makes sense. During such climatic good times the population grows to unstable levels. When the climate gets less productive, there is incentive to look elsewhere.

I've read somewhere that apparently there was a similar change of climate for the worse in Scandinavia before & then during the main 'Viking' period, too.

 

[ComradeHuxley]

They could, although rubber has only limited usefulness without vulcanization or some other curing method. The Mesoamericans cured rubber with the juice of another naive plant; would there be anything suitable that West Africans could use?

If rubber harvesting does catch on, it would happen in the Lower Niger and Congo rather than *Mali. It would also, unfortunately, cement a slave society in those regions; one constant about wild-rubber harvesting is that it's nasty labor that few would do voluntarily for pre-industrial wages."

Well, I can't say which plant would work, but it seems according to the Encyclopedia of American Indian Contributions to the World, it doesn't seem that there was a "one of a kind plant" used. Sure they seemed to have prefered certain palm plant nuts but something similar should be found in african tropics. Also the variety of uses for rubber is simply staggering. Before I looked a bit more into it, I always thought they just used rubber for their ball games.

 

[Oliver W. K. Twist]

I always seenlm to find myself on nearly dead threads. On the religious aspect from a few pages ago, the way you describe their base religion, I immediately thought it might develop into something perhsps resembling Shintoism. IIRC they didn't merge local deities with similar roles, snd the strong orsl znd theatrical tradition might discourage that trend, some of the most significant ones might merge, but the local river gods and harvest spirits would probably stick around.

 

[dissatisfieduser]

I'm not so sure about the "nearly" part of being dead.

 

[skozik]

This thread was incredibly dead, but it was a great read, so thanks for necroing

 

[Revachah]

It's weird that there is six pages and no one even spoke on the climatic pushed that is the clearest reason on 1. The heavy exploitation of crops that led to Agriculture and 2. The distinct trajectory of Sahelian/miombo subsistence compared to Eurasia and the Americas.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

I'm not so sure about the "nearly" part of being dead.

This thread was incredibly dead, but it was a great read, so thanks for necroing

It's in deep cryogenic storage, but it's not dead until I say it's dead - I do get new inspirations for old ideas on occasion, and I reserve the right to add to this as I sometimes do with Malê Rising.

Glad you liked it, BTW.

On the religious aspect from a few pages ago, the way you describe their base religion, I immediately thought it might develop into something perhsps resembling Shintoism. IIRC they didn't merge local deities with similar roles, snd the strong orsl znd theatrical tradition might discourage that trend, some of the most significant ones might merge, but the local river gods and harvest spirits would probably stick around.

Shintoism might actually be a fairly close analogue, although the comparison would be more to the modern Buddhist-inflected Shintoism than to that religion in its original form; it would be animism overlaid with Axial Age and classical ethical philosophy, though as you say, there would be much survival of the gods of home, hearth and nature.

It's weird that there is six pages and no one even spoke on the climatic pushed that is the clearest reason on 1. The heavy exploitation of crops that led to Agriculture and 2. The distinct trajectory of Sahelian/miombo subsistence compared to Eurasia and the Americas.

I mentioned the 5.9-kiloyear event in the first post, and I believe I referred to the 4.2-kiloyear event as key to the city-state transition, but I'll grant that both were mentioned largely in passing. Can you elaborate on the "distinct trajectory"?

 

[Revachah]

I mentioned the 5.9-kiloyear event in the first post, and I believe I referred to the 4.2-kiloyear event as key to the city-state transition, but I'll grant that both were mentioned largely in passing. Can you elaborate on the "distinct trajectory"?

In Africa, suitable sets of
factors for domestication came together late, rarely, and in highly varied
circumstances. This is largely because the unpredictable environments of
the early middle Holocene Sahara, and the mobile pastoral lifestyles they
fostered, together created circumstances in which humans would not have
exercised continuous, directional selection on cereals. Continuing intensive
use of wild plants indigenous to different parts of Africa led to the continent’s

Read the PDF "Cattle Before Crops", honestly before anyone does an African ATL they should actually read about the history of plant-human dynamics on the continent.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Read the PDF "Cattle Before Crops", honestly before anyone does an African ATL they should actually read about the history of plant-human dynamics on the continent.

Read it - thanks for the citation. The article is here if others want to check it out.

Anyway, while I haven't read that article before, I've seen similar arguments. That's part of the reason why I picked the Upper Niger Delta as the place for an earlier agricultural transition - because the annual flooding works to mitigate unpredictability in the same way as the Nile.

Everything the article says about the variability of rainfall in the Sahel applies to Egypt and the upper Nile Valley as well - in fact, it acknowledges that the variability is particularly high in North Africa. And yet, on page 117, it makes the point that the dependability of Nile floods allowed greater sedentarism and cultivation of wild crops:

Compared to the original Saharan herding environments, the Sudanese Nile offered more dependable, productive resources. This area also posed no particular problems for cattle, as it lies within their wild range. Like earlier local hunter-gatherers, pastoralists used large, semipermanent camps near the Nile, as at Esh Shaheinab and Geili (Caneva, 1988; Haaland, 1995; Krzyzaniak, 1991). Domestic animals are the dominant large mammals at many sites, such as Kadero c. 5000–4000 BP, but were added to a wide range of wild animals used by earlier hunter-gatherers (Gautier, 1984c; Haaland, 1992). Unlike Saharan pastoralists, herders in this better-watered landscape are thought to have used plants more intensively than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Site structure and increased use of grindstones at Kadero 1, Um Direiwa, and Zakiab indicate to Haaland (1981, 1992) that, as early as 5000 BP, pastoral groups were cultivating sorghum that was morphologically wild (Stemler, 1990).
​

The chart on page 125 also suggests that the upper and middle Niger were key areas for domestication of wild cereal crops, no doubt because, like the Nile, they were "predictably abundant" (130) and were thus areas where wild cereals could flourish in the first place and where cultivation would yield reliable food supplies.

The article does say that "areas with less than 558 mm p. a. average one crop failure in 10 years" (129) - but this too isn't terribly different from Egypt. Assuming that the flood patterns over the past ~1400 years can be extrapolated to antiquity, poor inundations occurred between 12 and 20 percent of the time, and even if we assume that the Chalcolithic inundations were more reliable, this would still be comparable to the Upper Niger Delta. Also, even a season of poor rainfall will usually inundate the parts of the floodplain that are closest to the river delta distributaries, albeit not the higher and more distant ground. The predictability of the flooding isn't 100 percent, but one bad year in ten was apparently reliable enough for other founding civilizations, especially if there are herds and fish resources to provide some margin of error.

So I do think it's plausible that western Saharan herders, given a push south by the 5.9-kiloyear event, might have encountered and started cultivating wild African rice in the Upper Niger Delta floodplain, transitioning over centuries to true domestication. What happened IOTL isn't destiny, and the fact that founder crops were eventually domesticated in that region during a period when the climate wasn't very different from the 4th millennium BC suggests that it could have happened earlier if a pastoralist group got a push into the region at that time.

 

[Revachah]

Read it - thanks for the citation. The article is here if others want to check it out.

Anyway, while I haven't read that article before, I've seen similar arguments. That's part of the reason why I picked the Upper Niger Delta as the place for an earlier agricultural transition - because the annual flooding works to mitigate unpredictability in the same way as the Nile.

Everything the article says about the variability of rainfall in the Sahel applies to Egypt and the upper Nile Valley as well - in fact, it acknowledges that the variability is particularly high in North Africa. And yet, on page 117, it makes the point that the dependability of Nile floods allowed greater sedentarism and cultivation of wild crops:

Compared to the original Saharan herding environments, the Sudanese Nile offered more dependable, productive resources. This area also posed no particular problems for cattle, as it lies within their wild range. Like earlier local hunter-gatherers, pastoralists used large, semipermanent camps near the Nile, as at Esh Shaheinab and Geili (Caneva, 1988; Haaland, 1995; Krzyzaniak, 1991). Domestic animals are the dominant large mammals at many sites, such as Kadero c. 5000–4000 BP, but were added to a wide range of wild animals used by earlier hunter-gatherers (Gautier, 1984c; Haaland, 1992). Unlike Saharan pastoralists, herders in this better-watered landscape are thought to have used plants more intensively than their hunter-gatherer predecessors. Site structure and increased use of grindstones at Kadero 1, Um Direiwa, and Zakiab indicate to Haaland (1981, 1992) that, as early as 5000 BP, pastoral groups were cultivating sorghum that was morphologically wild (Stemler, 1990).
​

The chart on page 125 also suggests that the upper and middle Niger were key areas for domestication of wild cereal crops, no doubt because, like the Nile, they were "predictably abundant" (130) and were thus areas where wild cereals could flourish in the first place and where cultivation would yield reliable food supplies.

The article does say that "areas with less than 558 mm p. a. average one crop failure in 10 years" (129) - but this too isn't terribly different from Egypt. Assuming that the flood patterns over the past ~1400 years can be extrapolated to antiquity, poor inundations occurred between 12 and 20 percent of the time, and even if we assume that the Chalcolithic inundations were more reliable, this would still be comparable to the Upper Niger Delta. Also, even a season of poor rainfall will usually inundate the parts of the floodplain that are closest to the river delta distributaries, albeit not the higher and more distant ground. The predictability of the flooding isn't 100 percent, but one bad year in ten was apparently reliable enough for other founding civilizations, especially if there are herds and fish resources to provide some margin of error.

So I do think it's plausible that western Saharan herders, given a push south by the 5.9-kiloyear event, might have encountered and started cultivating wild African rice in the Upper Niger Delta floodplain, transitioning over centuries to true domestication. What happened IOTL isn't destiny, and the fact that founder crops were eventually domesticated in that region during a period when the climate wasn't very different from the 4th millennium BC suggests that it could have happened earlier if a pastoralist group got a push into the region at that time.

This however is ignoring the fact that the impetus for plant dependency and eventual domestication was in the post-Subpluvial Saharan world.

Just as Eurasians agricultural development sprung from greater dependency on alluvial soil and water sources and key grains.

Still given the history of livestock and the prominence of cattle cults the rains would only encourage greater flocks of cattle.

But by all means you seem to know more than paleoclimatologists and archeologists.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

This however is ignoring the fact that the impetus for plant dependency and eventual domestication was in the post-Subpluvial Saharan world.

The Subpluvial declined after the 5.9-kiloyear event, with the desiccation of the Sahara beginning at that time, so the end-Subpluvial and post-Subpluvial peoples are exactly the ones I'm positing being pushed south. And the Egyptians had cattle cults too.

And no, of course I don't claim to know more than paleoclimatologists and archeologists, nor for that matter am I claiming to know better than you do. I'm an amateur as we all are here. OTOH, the climatologists and archaeologists are explaining how things actually happened and why they might have happened that way; they aren't saying that there were no other possible ways for plant or animal domestication to happen. Indeed there is no reason for them even to consider that question. There's a lot we don't know about the transition to agriculture - it's one of those things that always happens in prehistory, so we have to reconstruct it from fragmentary evidence - but I don't see that we can categorically exclude the development of agriculture in a region with growing conditions similar to other places where founder crops were domesticated.

 

[Revachah]

The Subpluvial declined after the 5.9-kiloyear event, with the desiccation of the Sahara beginning at that time, so the end-Subpluvial and post-Subpluvial peoples are exactly the ones I'm positing being pushed south. And the Egyptians had cattle cults too.

And no, of course I don't claim to know more than paleoclimatologists and archeologists, nor for that matter am I claiming to know better than you do. I'm an amateur as we all are here. OTOH, the climatologists and archaeologists are explaining how things actually happened and why they might have happened that way; they aren't saying that there were no other possible ways for plant or animal domestication to happen. Indeed there is no reason for them even to consider that question. There's a lot we don't know about the transition to agriculture - it's one of those things that always happens in prehistory, so we have to reconstruct it from fragmentary evidence - but I don't see that we can categorically exclude the development of agriculture in a region with growing conditions similar to other places where founder crops were domesticated.

The Egyptian cattle cults of Nabta Playa arose out of the interactions of peoples in the Green Sahara.

It's foundational to the foodways of a dessicating Saharan landscape that has for all intents and purposes set into motion a reshaping of Nile centered food production with the migration of post-Natufian Levantine Farmers. That agricultural system based on wadis was rearticulated with the annual Nile floods.

This is separate from Aqualithic society in the Western Sahel as we have seen, the reduction of rainfall did not modify foodways in the same extreme way as the southern expansion of Eurasians agriculture in Egypt. It was in fact something that went hand in hamd with annual migrations for Green pastures and is built on the symbiotic relationships between herder, herd and kreb field.

The domestication of rice is last, it was the endtail of old interactions and dynamics that bobbed and weaved between pastoralists and drying lake side horticulturalist turned farmers of Pearl millet and Sorghum.

This did not end with oppositional forces but long term and long standing relationships between stubble producing farmers post harvest in alluvial bottomlands and manure producing herds.

This also isn't even discussing "ephermal" agriculturalists who farmed when rains where abundant in the savanna nor is it discussing the agro-pastoralist societies that are more rule than exception south of Kush into the present day.

The brushing over and outright ignoring the given data to make a "neat" African ATL on AH is all too common, most readers don't have the knowledge to critique and take it all at face value. That's a mess.

African rice within the Niger Rover bend is the result of pulling oppositional forces in Sub Saharan post-Aqualithic food production.

There is only one other option for an earlier rice timeline but it's east and south that would be a much slower dispersing production system. That you or anyone else here hasn't even mentioned, which is surprising given the focus on this topic is Africans and Oryza.