Who Took African Sorghum And Pearl Millet To Asia.

[anansi]

On the Origins and Dissemination of Domesticated Sorghum and Pearl Millet across Africa and into India: a View from the Butana Group of the Far Eastern Sahel

Four decades have passed since Harlan and Stemler (1976) proposed the eastern Sahelian zone as the most likely center of Sorghum bicolor domestication. Recently, new data on seed impressions on Butana Group pottery, from the fourth millennium BC in the southern Atbai region of the far eastern Sahelian Belt in Africa, show evidence for cultivation activities of sorghum displaying some domestication traits. Pennisetum glaucum may have been undergoing domestication shortly thereafter in the western Sahel, as finds of fully domesticated pearl millet are present in southeastern Mali by the second half of the third millennium BC, and present in eastern Sudan by the early second millennium BC. The dispersal of the latter to India took less than 1000 years according to present data. Here, we review the middle Holocene Sudanese archaeological data for the first time, to situate the origins and spread of these two native summer rainfall cereals in what is proposed to be their eastern Sahelian Sudan gateway to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade.

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) and pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) formed an integral part of the caloric base of most Neolithic and Iron Age food-producing societies in the Sahelian belt (Bourlag 1996; Harlan 1992) and, beyond the scope of this paper, elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In light of new evidence that has begun to place the domestication processes of both cereals in time and space, we re-assess the early evidence of these crops within the context of the mid-Holocene and Neolithic cultural traditions of Sahelian Sudan, which we model as having played key roles in sorghum domestication and pearl millet dispersal. The aims of this paper are twofold: first to provide the regional archaeological context in which sorghum domestication can be framed, and second, to consider the eastern Sudan as the gateway through which both domesticated sorghum and pearl millet passed en route to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade networks.

Both cereals played and play an important traditional role in Asia, especially in India, where they became established as crops between 4000 and 3500 years ago (Boivin and Fuller 2009; Fuller 2003). However, these cereals derived from distinct centers of domestication in sub-Saharan Africa, with the first known domesticated pearl millet in the western sub-Saharan Sahelian zone and sorghum in eastern Sudan (Harlan 1971, 1992; Fuller and Hildebrand 2013). Hard evidence for the domestication processes and the earliest dispersal of these cereals remained elusive until recently (Kahlheber and Neumann 2007; Manning et al. 2011; Winchell et al. 2017).
link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10437-018-9314-2

So here is my question , who was transporting those crops 4kyrs ago, in another pdf file it has been suggested that the crops did not move over land but more likely transported by sea, what I've not been able to ascertain outside of Dr Winters is the who, this would seem to bolster Some of his theories about widespread Kushite influence,because a relay system of trade is to be ruled out, then ocean going Kushites or ocean going Indians is responsible,the question again is who,it also call into play that the Indian ocean trade is extremely old.

[anansi]

As argued previously by Beldados (2012, p. 101) and more recently by Winchell et al. (2017), the environmental and social conditions present in the fertile savanna zone of the southern Atbai (eastern Sahel, Sudan) was optimal for the domestication of sorghum. This region had well-established early ceramic-producing cultures of hunter-foragers since the mid-sixth millennium BC (Pre-Saroba and Saroba Group, Table 1).

These peoples eventually became sedentary more than 2000 years later and were associated with a ceramic-bearing culture defined as the Butana Group (Winchell 2013). Subsequently, the successor Gash Group established a socially complex administrative center at Mahal Teglinos near Kassala.

They conducted trade with the states of Egypt and Kerma and other cultures of Lower and Upper Nubia, as well as with groups further east in the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands and across the Red Sea into the southern Arabia Peninsula (Fattovich 2010, 2012; Bard and Fattovich 2013).

Here, it is proposed that the Gash Group was the culture, which may have been most responsible for the transference of native African summer rainfall cereals to India by the end of the third millennium BC, as it had contact with other cultures in Arabia, especially coastal and fishing people, who, in turn, would have had contact with the Indian continent further to the east (Boivin and Fuller 2009).

At about the same time, domesticated pearl millet may have been present at Shaqadud Cave to the west, but its presence or that of other cereals can only be verified by new samples from undisputed, securely dated stratigraphic contexts from fresh excavations. Nevertheless, pearl millet was present along with sorghum at Kassala, ca. 1900 BC (Beldados et al. 2018). Thus, it is the right time to reassess the evidence of the presence of these two cereals in the far eastern Sahel.

Again Dr Winters position seemed to have been on point and vindicated in a broader context by botanist/archeologist.