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Comments on the Thesis that there was a Major Centre of Plant Domestication Near the Headwaters of the River Niger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

H. G. Baker
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Extract

In his book, Africa; its peoples and their culture history, ethnographer G. P. Murdock has undertaken a tremendous interpretive task based upon a survey of the literature. Of consequence here is his thesis that

… agriculture was independently developed [at about 5000 B.C.] by the Negroes of West Africa. This was, moreover, a genuine invention, not a borrowing from another people. Furthermore, the assemblage of cultivated plants ennobled from wild forms in Negro Africa ranks as one of the four major agricultural complexes evolved in the entire course of human history … The invention of agriculture in Negro Africa is most probably to be credited to the Mande peoples around the headwaters of the Niger in the extreme western part of the Sudan, less than 1,000 miles from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 1962 , pp. 229 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1962

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References

1 Murdock, G. P., Africa; its peoples and their culture history (New York, 1959), 64–7.Google Scholar

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16 Whilst Murdock's book was in press, he added African rice (Oryza glaberrima) to his list. According to Dalziel,6 this indigenous species is cultivated in the interior from the ‘French Sudan’ to northern Nigeria. It and the related O. barthii and O. stapfii form a complex of which O. stapfii may be the parent. They now often grow as weeds in fields of the unquestionably introduced cultivated rice (O. sativa), and may eventually exterminate the preferred crop if left unharvested. The evolutionary lineage leading from barthii or stapfii to glaberrima cannot be a long one and hybridization may have been important in the development of the races found at the present day. Once again, the appearance is consistent with the local addition of a crop to an agricultural system which may have originated elsewhere.Google Scholar

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