Page 45 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

The Backwoods 27
east. To the north the grass fades out into the wastes of the Sa­
hara, to the south it is swamped in the forests of the Gold Coast
and the Congo. It is an area as large as Europe, and at the be­
ginning of the Second Millennium b.c. it too is occupied—let us
qualify that: there is evidence that it probably was occupied—
by agricultural peoples.
They are dark of skin, these farmers of Africa (they are the
ancestors of most of the Negroes of America), and they live in
thatched huts in small communities, surrounded by their fields.
They know no more of Europe than Europe knows of them, and
their agriculture is very different from that practiced north of
the Sahara and of the Mediterranean. They grow no wheat or
barley, though the easternmost communities are in precarious,
and often warlike, contact with Egypt, and are there learning of
the existence of barley and millet. Their life is based on the
cultivation of sorghum and ground nuts, gourds and watermel­
ons, supplemented by hunting, for they have no domestic ani­
mals—though again in the east they have picked up from Egypt
the idea of keeping sheep and even cattle.
In an area the size of Europe there is as much diversity as
in Europe, and undoubtedly the Nubians in the Sudan regarded
themselves as vastly more cultured than the semihunters, semi­
gardeners of the far west. But over the whole range agriculture
is so old that no tradition remains of its beginnings. We, too,
know little of its origins. We are inclined to date the first begin­
nings to 4000 or even 5000 b.c., and we are allowed to speculate
whether the idea of taming wild plants occurred independently
to the inhabitants of this region, or whether the idea came—with­
out the crops—from the old cultivators of the Nile valley and was
merely translated in the Niger valley to the wild plants of that
region. We shall meet the same problem elsewhere, and we
need not take a stand with either the champions of diffusion or
those of independent invention; whichever was the case, it hap­
pened everywhere long before our story opens. Again as in Eu­
rope, the African farmers use solely implements and weapons of
stone and wood, with a little bronze (probably more than we
guess) being traded for ivory into the Sudan from Egypt. The
art of weaving, too, and potterymaking peter out as one travels