List of Animals and Crops Dometsicated in Africa

[mansamusa]

Feel free to add to the list and to add dates.

For animals:

Cattle (nevermind the critiques whose alternative explanation of a Levantine origin has little to zero evidence compared to the controversial evidence of Nabta Playa).

The Donkey, believed to be domesticated in Nubia.

The African Guinea fowl

The cat??

For Plants:

African Rice 

African Sorghum from as early as 3400 BC

[mansamusa]

On the guineafowl:

"The helmeted guinea fowl Numida meleagris belongs to the order Galliformes. Its natural range includes a large part of sub‐Saharan Africa, from Senegal to Eritrea and from Chad to South Africa. Archaeozoological and artistic evidence suggest domestication of this species may have occurred about 2,000 years BP in Mali and Sudan primarily as a food resource, although villagers also benefit from its capacity to give loud alarm calls in case of danger, of its ability to consume parasites such as ticks and to hunt snakes, thus suggesting its domestication may have resulted from a commensal association process. Today, it is still farmed in Africa, mainly as a traditional village poultry, and is also bred more intensively in other countries, mainly France and Italy. The lack of available molecular genetic markers has limited the genetic studies conducted to date on guinea fowl. We present here a first‐generation whole‐genome sequence draft assembly used as a reference for a study by a Pool‐seq approach of wild and domestic populations from Europe and Africa. We show that the domestic populations share a higher genetic similarity between each other than they do to wild populations living in the same geographical area. Several genomic regions showing selection signatures putatively related to domestication or importation to Europe were detected, containing candidate genes, most notably EDNRB2, possibly explaining losses in plumage coloration phenotypes in domesticated populations."

I forgot to include Yam Beans (Sphenostylis stenocarpa, leguminosae) : 

"Cladistic and phenetic analyses of morphological, chloroplast DNA, and isozyme variation were used to examine relationships among multiple accessions of Sphenostylis sten ocarpa, representing wild and cultivated populations from throughout the range of the species. In morphometric and isozyme analyses, greater variability was detected among wild than among cultivated populations, and no differentiation was found between races cultivated for tubers and those cultivated for seeds. cpDNA data, however, revealed five groups of plastomes within S. stenocarpa: one in accessions cultivated for tubers, one in accessions cultivated for seeds, and three among wild accessions. Linguistic evidence and observations on the uses of the species in its two main areas of cultivation suggest independent origins of tuber- and seed- cultivated races. The data support two alternative explanations for the distribution of extant cultivated accessions ofS. stenocarpa. The first hypothesis is that the species was domesticated independently in western and central Africa, but that domestication events involved selection from a single restricted gene pool. The second hypothesis is that a single domestication event occurred in one of the two areas, but that human dispersal to the second area occurred prior to dispersal within either area."

It's a legume. I came across it while looking for the other type of yam. lol. 

[anansi]

Ancient Africa in World History: Invention, Innovation, Impact



Sorry this one first as it's more pertinent to the topic the bottom one is a good follow up.




Great list I think the tamarind thought to be of Indian origin but is really African, also as explained by Chris Ereth , on point about the donkey, he said Red Sea area and showed up early in Sumer,water melon there are a few others but anyways klik the vid, I'm telling you guys sub to the Hutchins Center ,some very interesting lectures from experts from various fields.I

Forgot to tell ya ffwd past the 20 min Mark to avoid dead space, they don't edit worth a damn.

[zarahan]

Good link, showing that many plants were domesticated independently in Africa.
Others were imports gradually adopted by native peoples on their own terms without
any mass migration inwards. African rice cultivation is interesting. If I remember
there was a page on how the rice cultivation skills were brought to the Americas.

[mansamusa]

Should we add the dog to the list?
African Dogs

Modern humans originated in Africa, and now it looks like man's best friend first emerged there too.



An extensive genetic study on the ancestry of African village dogs points to a Eurasian — possibly North African — origin for the domestication of dogs.



Prior research concluded that dogs likely originated in East Asia. However, this latest study, the most thorough investigation ever on the ancestry of African village dogs, indicates otherwise.



"Village" dogs are local, semi-feral dogs that cluster around human settlements in much of the world.



"I think our results cast some doubt on the hypothesis of an East Asian origin for dog domestication that was put forward based on previous mitochondrial DNA genetic research," lead author Adam Boyko told Discovery News.



Boyko, a research associate in the Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University, and his colleagues looked at three genetic markers for 318 village dogs from seven regions in Egypt, Uganda and Namibia. The scientists performed the same DNA analysis on a number of putatively African dog breeds, as well as on Puerto Rican street dogs and mixed breed dogs from the United States.



The scientists determined genetic diversity was just as high for the African dogs as it was for the East Asian village dogs that were the focus of the earlier research.



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"Species tend to show the highest genetic diversity near their place of origin," said Boyko. He explained that this is because the species have "been there longer and therefore have had more time to accumulate diversity, and because as a species expands its range by colonizing a new region, it usually does so with a relatively small band of individuals carrying just a subset of the genetic diversity found in the ancestral population."



Seven signs of evolution in action

Humans might have then first domesticated dogs from wolves in Africa, with Egypt being one possibility, since wolves are native to that region. Many existing wild species of canid, such as the Egyptian jackal, popularly featured in ancient Egyptian art, are now critically endangered.