This is an interesting article. Does anyone know who the 'Middle Easterners' were who they say are responsible for the spread of cereals 10,500 years ago ?
In my mind, the term 'Middle East' is very vague because it covers a wide area and when you look at places like the southern Levant (Israel/Palestine) its right next door to Africa, was connected to it via the Sinai and sits on the same tectonic plate.
www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/11/2014/domestic-cereals-in-evidence-7000-years-ago-in-sudan Good link. It shows wheat and barley were known to the indigenous Africans
and as Keita says were part of a package of plants used for food, as determined
by, and by the perogative of the indigenous African peoples without any need
of "Middle Eastern" migrants, "colonists" or settlers." Course such may
have been Africans themselves circa 10,000BC.
There is some data to the effect of Africa being first mover in some
domestications, though so far the "Middle East" also has a good claim.
And of course many advances were independently initiated in Africa such
as domestication of cattle.
But as was said above, Sinai itself is part of Africa for one thing,
regionally (it belongs to a country on the African continent called Egypt)
and physically via tectonic plate arrangements.
But even without Sinai there was/is so much overlap between Africa and
the so-called "Middle East"- with African populations spreading out into Arabia
and Mesopotamia, that the notion of what is supposedly authentic "Middle East"
has to be reexamined. Data on some counts shows so-called "Middle Easterners"
more resembled today's tropical Africans than Arabized types that now
fill the region. These were joined by other peoples at various times
and places from further east or North as in Anatolia etc, eventually
producing a variable population. This does not mean peoples of the two areas
were identical in all eras, but that the simplistic "splittism" that neatly
marks off the "Middle East" as having nothing to do with Africa, or Africa
being only a ONE-WAY recipient or "importer" is dubious and flawed.
On some counts, and in some eras, even "Middle Easterners" like the peoples
of Iran resembled tropical Africans..
