Part 17 (1/2)

These Austronesians, with their Austronesian language and modified Austronesian culture, were already established on Madagascar by the time it was first visited by Europeans, in 1500. This strikes me as the single most astonis.h.i.+ng fact of human geography for the entire world. It's as if Columbus, on reaching Cuba, had found it occupied by blue-eyed, blond-haired Scandinavians speaking a language close to Swedish, even though the nearby North American continent was inhabited by Native Americans speaking Amerindian languages. How on earth could prehistoric people of Borneo, presumably voyaging in boats without maps or compa.s.ses, end up in Madagascar?

THE CASE OF Madagascar tells us that peoples' languages, as well as their physical appearance, can yield important clues to their origins. Just by looking at the people of Madagascar, we'd have known that some of them came from tropical Southeast Asia, but we wouldn't have known from which area of tropical Southeast Asia, and we'd never have guessed Borneo. What else can we learn from African languages that we didn't already know from African faces? Madagascar tells us that peoples' languages, as well as their physical appearance, can yield important clues to their origins. Just by looking at the people of Madagascar, we'd have known that some of them came from tropical Southeast Asia, but we wouldn't have known from which area of tropical Southeast Asia, and we'd never have guessed Borneo. What else can we learn from African languages that we didn't already know from African faces?

The mind-boggling complexities of Africa's 1,500 languages were clarified by Stanford University's great linguist Joseph Greenberg, who recognized that all those languages fall into just five families (see Figure 19.2 for their distribution). Readers accustomed to thinking of linguistics as dull and technical may be surprised to learn what fascinating contributions Figure 19.2 makes to our understanding of African history.

If we begin by comparing Figure 19.2 with Figure 19.1, we'll see a rough correspondence between language families and anatomically defined human groups: languages of a given language family tend to be spoken by distinct people. In particular, Afroasiatic speakers mostly prove to be people who would be cla.s.sified as whites or blacks, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo speakers prove to be blacks, Khoisan speakers Khoisan, and Austronesian speakers Indonesian. This suggests that languages have tended to evolve along with the people who speak them.

Concealed at the top of Figure 19.2 is our first surprise, a big shock for Eurocentric believers in the superiority of so-called Western civilization. We're taught that Western civilization originated in the Near East, was brought to brilliant heights in Europe by the Greeks and Romans, and produced three of the world's great religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Those religions arose among peoples speaking three closely related languages, termed Semitic languages: Aramaic (the language of Christ and the Apostles), Hebrew, and Arabic, respectively. We instinctively a.s.sociate Semitic peoples with the Near East.

However, Greenberg determined that Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afroasiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa. Even the Semitic subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.

The next surprise in Figure 19.2 is a seeming detail on which I didn't comment when I just told you that distinct peoples tend to have distinct languages. Among Africa's five groups of people-blacks, whites, Pygmies, Khoisan, and Indonesians-only the Pygmies lack any distinct languages: each band of Pygmies speaks the same language as the neighboring group of black farmers. However, if one compares a given language as spoken by Pygmies with the same language as spoken by blacks, the Pygmy version seems to contain some unique words with distinctive sounds.

Originally, of course, people as distinctive as the Pygmies, living in a place as distinctive as the equatorial African rain forest, were surely isolated enough to develop their own language family. However, today those languages are gone, and we already saw from Figure 19.1 that the Pygmies' modern distribution is highly fragmented. Thus, distributional and linguistic clues combine to suggest that the Pygmy homeland was engulfed by invading black farmers, whose languages the remaining Pygmies adopted, leaving only traces of their original languages in some words and sounds. We saw previously that much the same is true of the Malaysian Negritos (Semang) and Philippine Negritos, who adopted Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages, respectively, from the farmers who came to surround them.

The fragmented distribution of Nilo-Saharan languages in Figure 19.2 similarly implies that many speakers of those languages have been engulfed by speakers of Afroasiatic or Niger-Congo languages. But the distribution of Khoisan languages testifies to an even more dramatic engulfing. Those languages are famously unique in the whole world in their use of clicks as consonants. (If you've been puzzled by the name !Kung Bushman, the exclamation mark is not an expression of premature astonishment; it's just how linguists denote a click.) All existing Khoisan languages are confined to southern Africa, with two exceptions. Those exceptions are two very distinctive, click-laden Khoisan languages named Hadza and Sandawe, stranded in Tanzania more than 1,000 miles from the nearest Khoisan languages of southern Africa.

In addition, Xhosa and a few other Niger-Congo languages of southern Africa are full of clicks. Even more unexpectedly, clicks or Khoisan words also appear in two Afroasiatic languages spoken by blacks in Kenya, stranded still farther from present Khoisan peoples than are the Hadza and Sandawe peoples of Tanzania. All this suggests that Khoisan languages and peoples formerly extended far north of their present southern African distribution, until they too, like the Pygmies, were engulfed by the blacks, leaving only linguistic legacies of their former presence. That's a unique contribution of the linguistic evidence, something we could hardly have guessed just from physical studies of living people.

I have saved the most remarkable contribution of linguistics for last. If you look again at Figure 19.2, you'll see that the Niger-Congo language family is distributed all over West Africa and most of subequatorial Africa, apparently giving no clue as to where within that enormous range the family originated. However, Greenberg recognized that all Niger-Congo languages of subequatorial Africa belong to a single language subgroup termed Bantu. That subgroup accounts for nearly half of the 1,032 Niger-Congo languages and for more than half (nearly 200 million) of the Niger-Congo speakers. But all those 500 Bantu languages are so similar to each other that they have been facetiously described as 500 dialects of a single language.

Collectively, the Bantu languages const.i.tute only a single, low-order subfamily of the Niger-Congo language family. Most of the 176 other subfamilies are crammed into West Africa, a small fraction of the entire Niger-Congo range. In particular, the most distinctive Bantu languages, and the non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages most closely related to Bantu languages, are packed into a tiny area of Cameroon and adjacent eastern Nigeria.

Evidently, the Niger-Congo language family arose in West Africa; the Bantu branch of it arose at the east end of that range, in Cameroon and Nigeria; and the Bantu then spread out of that homeland over most of subequatorial Africa. That spread must have begun long ago enough that the ancestral Bantu language had time to split into 500 daughter languages, but nevertheless recently enough that all those daughter languages are still very similar to each other. Since all other Niger-Congo speakers, as well as the Bantu, are blacks, we couldn't have inferred who migrated in which direction just from the evidence of physical anthropology.

To make this type of linguistic reasoning clear, let me give you a familiar example: the geographic origins of the English language. Today, by far the largest number of people whose first language is English live in North America, with others scattered over the globe in Britain, Australia, and other countries. Each of those countries has its own dialects of English. If we knew nothing else about language distributions and history, we might have guessed that the English language arose in North America and was carried overseas to Britain and Australia by colonists.

But all those English dialects form only one low-order subgroup of the Germanic language family. All the other subgroups-the various Scandinavian, German, and Dutch languages-are crammed into northwestern Europe. In particular, Frisian, the other Germanic language most closely related to English, is confined to a tiny coastal area of Holland and western Germany. Hence a linguist would immediately deduce correctly that the English language arose in coastal northwestern Europe and spread around the world from there. In fact, we know from recorded history that English really was carried from there to England by invading Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. A.D.

Essentially the same line of reasoning tells us that the nearly 200 million Bantu people, now flung over much of the map of Africa, arose from Cameroon and Nigeria. Along with the North African origins of Semites and the origins of Madagascar's Asians, that's another conclusion that we couldn't have reached without linguistic evidence.

We had already deduced, from Khoisan language distributions and the lack of distinct Pygmy languages, that Pygmies and Khoisan peoples had formerly ranged more widely, until they were engulfed by blacks. (I'm using ”engulfing” as a neutral all-embracing word, regardless of whether the process involved conquest, expulsion, interbreeding, killing, or epidemics.) We've now seen, from Niger-Congo language distributions, that the blacks who did the engulfing were the Bantu. The physical and linguistic evidence considered so far has let us infer these prehistoric engulfings, but it still hasn't solved their mysteries for us. Only the further evidence that I'll now present can help us answer two more questions: What advantages enabled the Bantu to displace the Pygmies and Khoisan? When did the Bantu reach the former Pygmy and Khoisan homelands?

TO APPROACH THE question about the Bantu's advantages, let's examine the remaining type of evidence from the living present-the evidence derived from domesticated plants and animals. As we saw in previous chapters, that evidence is important because food production led to high population densities, germs, technology, political organization, and other ingredients of power. Peoples who, by accident of their geographic location, inherited or developed food production thereby became able to engulf geographically less endowed people. question about the Bantu's advantages, let's examine the remaining type of evidence from the living present-the evidence derived from domesticated plants and animals. As we saw in previous chapters, that evidence is important because food production led to high population densities, germs, technology, political organization, and other ingredients of power. Peoples who, by accident of their geographic location, inherited or developed food production thereby became able to engulf geographically less endowed people.

When Europeans reached sub-Saharan Africa in the 1400s, Africans were growing five sets of crops (Figure 19.3), each of them laden with significance for African history. The first set was grown only in North Africa, extending to the highlands of Ethiopia. North Africa enjoys a Mediterranean climate, characterized by rainfall concentrated in the winter months. (Southern California also experiences a Mediterranean climate, explaining why my bas.e.m.e.nt and that of millions of other southern Californians often gets flooded in the winter but infallibly dries out in the summer.) The Fertile Crescent, where agriculture arose, enjoys that same Mediterranean pattern of winter rains.

Hence North Africa's original crops all prove to be ones adapted to germinating and growing with winter rains, and known from archaeological evidence to have been first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent beginning around 10,000 years ago. Those Fertile Crescent crops spread into climatically similar adjacent areas of North Africa and laid the foundations for the rise of ancient Egyptian civilization. They include such familiar crops as wheat, barley, peas, beans, and grapes. These are familiar to us precisely because they also spread into climatically similar adjacent areas of Europe, thence to America and Australia, and became some of the staple crops of temperate-zone agriculture around the world.

As one travels south in Africa across the Saharan desert and reencounters rain in the Sahel zone just south of the desert, one notices that Sahel rains fall in the summer rather than in the winter. Even if Fertile Crescent crops adapted to winter rain could somehow have crossed the Sahara, they would have been difficult to grow in the summer-rain Sahel zone. Instead, we find two sets of African crops whose wild ancestors occur just south of the Sahara, and which are adapted to summer rains and less seasonal variation in day length. One set consists of plants whose ancestors are widely distributed from west to east across the Sahel zone and were probably domesticated there. They include, notably, sorghum and pearl millet, which became the staple cereals of much of sub-Saharan Africa. Sorghum proved so valuable that it is now grown in areas with hot, dry climates on all the continents, including in the United States.

The other set consists of plants whose wild ancestors occur in Ethiopia and were probably domesticated there in the highlands. Most are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Americans-including Ethiopia's narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog, its finger millet used to brew its national beer, and its tiny-seeded cereal called teff, used to make its national bread. But every reader addicted to coffee can thank ancient Ethiopian farmers for domesticating the coffee plant. It remained confined to Ethiopia until it caught on in Arabia and then around the world, to sustain today the economies of countries as far-flung as Brazil and Papua New Guinea.

The next-to-last set of African crops arose from wild ancestors in the wet climate of West Africa. Some, including African rice, have remained virtually confined there; others, such as African yams, spread throughout other areas of sub-Saharan Africa; and two, the oil palm and kola nut, reached other continents. West Africans were chewing the caffeine-containing nuts of the latter as a narcotic, long before the Coca-Cola Company enticed first Americans and then the world to drink a beverage originally laced with its extracts.

The last batch of African crops is also adapted to wet climates but provides the biggest surprise of Figure 19.3. Bananas, Asian yams, and taro were already widespread in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1400s, and Asian rice was established on the coast of East Africa. But those crops originated in tropical Southeast Asia. Their presence in Africa would astonish us, if the presence of Indonesian people on Madagascar had not already alerted us to Africa's prehistoric Asian connection. Did Austronesians sailing from Borneo land on the East African coast, bestow their crops on grateful African farmers, pick up African fishermen, and sail off into the sunrise to colonize Madagascar, leaving no other Austronesian traces in Africa?

The remaining surprise is that all of Africa's indigenous crops-those of the Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa-originated north of the equator. Not a single African crop originated south of it. This already gives us a hint why speakers of Niger-Congo languages, stemming from north of the equator, were able to displace Africa's equatorial Pygmies and subequatorial Khoisan people. The failure of the Khoisan and Pygmies to develop agriculture was due not to any inadequacy of theirs as farmers but merely to the accident that southern Africa's wild plants were mostly unsuitable for domestication. Neither Bantu nor white farmers, heirs to thousands of years of farming experience, were subsequently able to develop southern African native plants into food crops.

Africa's domesticated animal species can be summarized much more quickly than its plants, because there are so few of them. The sole animal that we know for sure was domesticated in Africa, because its wild ancestor is confined there, is a turkeylike bird called the guinea fowl. Wild ancestors of domestic cattle, donkeys, pigs, dogs, and house cats were native to North Africa but also to Southwest Asia, so we can't yet be certain where they were first domesticated, although the earliest dates currently known for domestic donkeys and house cats favor Egypt. Recent evidence suggests that cattle may have been domesticated independently in North Africa, Southwest Asia, and India, and that all three of those stocks have contributed to modern African cattle breeds. Otherwise, all the remainder of Africa's domestic mammals must have been domesticated elsewhere and introduced as domesticates to Africa, because their wild ancestors occur only in Eurasia. Africa's sheep and goats were domesticated in Southwest Asia, its chickens in Southeast Asia, its horses in southern Russia, and its camels probably in Arabia.

The most unexpected feature of this list of African domestic animals is again a negative one. The list includes not a single one of the big wild mammal species for which Africa is famous and which it possesses in such abundance-its zebras and wildebeests, its rhinos and hippos, its giraffes and buffalo. As we'll see, that reality was as fraught with consequences for African history as was the absence of native domestic plants in subequatorial Africa.

This quick tour through Africa's food staples suffices to show that some of them traveled a long way from their points of origin, both inside and outside Africa. In Africa as elsewhere in the world, some peoples were much ”luckier” than others, in the suites of domesticable wild plant and animal species that they inherited from their environment. By a.n.a.logy with the engulfing of Aboriginal Australian hunter-gatherers by British colonists fed on wheat and cattle, we have to suspect that some of the ”lucky” Africans parlayed their advantage into engulfing their African neighbors. Now, at last, let's turn to the archaeological record to find out who engulfed whom when.

WHAT CAN ARCHAEOLOGY can tell us about actual dates and places for the rise of farming and herding in Africa? Any reader steeped in the history of Western civilization would be forgiven for a.s.suming that African food production began in ancient Egypt's Nile Valley, land of the pharaohs and pyramids. After all, Egypt by 3000 can tell us about actual dates and places for the rise of farming and herding in Africa? Any reader steeped in the history of Western civilization would be forgiven for a.s.suming that African food production began in ancient Egypt's Nile Valley, land of the pharaohs and pyramids. After all, Egypt by 3000 B.C. B.C. was undoubtedly the site of Africa's most complex society, and one of the world's earliest centers of writing. In fact, though, possibly the earliest archaeological evidence for food production in Africa comes instead from the Sahara. was undoubtedly the site of Africa's most complex society, and one of the world's earliest centers of writing. In fact, though, possibly the earliest archaeological evidence for food production in Africa comes instead from the Sahara.

Today, of course, much of the Sahara is so dry that it cannot support even gra.s.s. But between about 9000 and 4000 B.C. B.C. the Sahara was more humid, held numerous lakes, and teemed with game. In that period, Saharans began to tend cattle and make pottery, then to keep sheep and goats, and they may also have been starting to domesticate sorghum and millet. Saharan pastoralism precedes the earliest known date (5200 the Sahara was more humid, held numerous lakes, and teemed with game. In that period, Saharans began to tend cattle and make pottery, then to keep sheep and goats, and they may also have been starting to domesticate sorghum and millet. Saharan pastoralism precedes the earliest known date (5200 B.C. B.C.) for the arrival of food production in Egypt, in the form of a full package of Southwest Asian winter crops and livestock. Food production also arose in West Africa and Ethiopia, and by around 2500 B.C. B.C. cattle herders had already crossed the modern border from Ethiopia into northern Kenya. cattle herders had already crossed the modern border from Ethiopia into northern Kenya.

While those conclusions rest on archaeological evidence, there is also an independent method for dating the arrival of domestic plants and animals: by comparing the words for them in modern languages. Comparisons of terms for plants in southern Nigerian languages of the Niger-Congo family show that the words fall into three groups. First are cases in which the word for a particular crop is very similar in all those southern Nigerian languages. Those crops prove to be ones like West African yams, oil palm, and kola nut-plants that were already believed on botanical and other evidence to be native to West Africa and first domesticated there. Since those are the oldest West African crops, all modern southern Nigerian languages inherited the same original set of words for them.

Next come crops whose names are consistent only among the languages falling within a small subgroup of those southern Nigerian languages. Those crops turn out to be ones believed to be of Indonesian origin, such as bananas and Asian yams. Evidently, those crops reached southern Nigeria only after languages began to break up into subgroups, so each subgroup coined or received different names for the new plants, which the modern languages of only that particular subgroup inherited. Last come crop names that aren't consistent within language groups at all, but instead follow trade routes. These prove to be New World crops like corn and peanuts, which we know were introduced into Africa after the beginnings of transatlantic s.h.i.+p traffic (A.D. 1492) and diffused since then along trade routes, often bearing their Portuguese or other foreign names. 1492) and diffused since then along trade routes, often bearing their Portuguese or other foreign names.

Thus, even if we possessed no botanical or archaeological evidence whatsoever, we would still be able to deduce from the linguistic evidence alone that native West African crops were domesticated first, that Indonesian crops arrived next, and that finally the European introductions came in. The UCLA historian Christopher Ehret has applied this linguistic approach to determining the sequence in which domestic plants and animals became utilized by the people of each African language family. By a method termed glottochronology, based on calculations of how rapidly words tend to change over historical time, comparative linguistics can even yield estimated dates for domestications or crop arrivals.

Putting together direct archaeological evidence of crops with the more indirect linguistic evidence, we deduce that the people who were domesticating sorghum and millet in the Sahara thousands of years ago spoke languages ancestral to modern Nilo-Saharan languages. Similarly, the people who first domesticated wet-country crops of West Africa spoke languages ancestral to the modern Niger-Congo languages. Finally, speakers of ancestral Afroasiatic languages may have been involved in domesticating the crops native to Ethiopia, and they certainly introduced Fertile Crescent crops to North Africa.

Thus, the evidence derived from plant names in modern African languages permits us to glimpse the existence of three languages being spoken in Africa thousands of years ago: ancestral Nilo-Saharan, ancestral Niger-Congo, and ancestral Afroasiatic. In addition, we can glimpse the existence of ancestral Khoisan from other linguistic evidence, though not that of crop names (because ancestral Khoisan people domesticated no crops). Now surely, since Africa harbors 1,500 languages today, it is big enough to have harbored more than four ancestral languages thousands of years ago. But all those other languages must have disappeared-either because the people speaking them survived but lost their original language, like the Pygmies, or because the people themselves disappeared.

The survival of modern Africa's four native language families (that is, the four other than the recently arrived Austronesian language of Madagascar) isn't due to the intrinsic superiority of those languages as vehicles for communication. Instead, it must be attributed to a historical accident: ancestral speakers of Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo, and Afroasiatic happened to be living at the right place and time to acquire domestic plants and animals, which let them multiply and either replace other peoples or impose their language. The few modern Khoisan speakers survived mainly because of their isolation in areas of southern Africa unsuitable for Bantu farming.

BEFORE WE TRACE Khoisan survival beyond the Bantu tide, let's see what archaeology tells us about Africa's other great prehistoric population movement-the Austronesian colonization of Madagascar. Archaeologists exploring Madagascar have now proved that Austronesians had arrived at least by Khoisan survival beyond the Bantu tide, let's see what archaeology tells us about Africa's other great prehistoric population movement-the Austronesian colonization of Madagascar. Archaeologists exploring Madagascar have now proved that Austronesians had arrived at least by A.D. A.D. 800, possibly as early as 800, possibly as early as A.D. A.D. 300. There the Austronesians encountered (and proceeded to exterminate) a strange world of living animals as distinctive as if they had come from another planet, because those animals had evolved on Madagascar during its long isolation. They included giant elephant birds, primitive primates called lemurs as big as gorillas, and pygmy hippos. Archaeological excavations of the earliest human settlements on Madagascar yield remains of iron tools, livestock, and crops, so the colonists were not just a small canoeload of fishermen blown off course; they formed a full-fledged expedition. How did that prehistoric 4,000-mile expedition come about? 300. There the Austronesians encountered (and proceeded to exterminate) a strange world of living animals as distinctive as if they had come from another planet, because those animals had evolved on Madagascar during its long isolation. They included giant elephant birds, primitive primates called lemurs as big as gorillas, and pygmy hippos. Archaeological excavations of the earliest human settlements on Madagascar yield remains of iron tools, livestock, and crops, so the colonists were not just a small canoeload of fishermen blown off course; they formed a full-fledged expedition. How did that prehistoric 4,000-mile expedition come about?

One hint is in an ancient book of sailors' directions, the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, written by an anonymous merchant living in Egypt around A.D. A.D. 100. The merchant describes an already thriving sea trade connecting India and Egypt with the coast of East Africa. With the spread of Islam after 100. The merchant describes an already thriving sea trade connecting India and Egypt with the coast of East Africa. With the spread of Islam after A.D. A.D. 800, Indian Ocean trade becomes well doc.u.mented archaeologically by copious quant.i.ties of Mideastern (and occasionally even Chinese!) products such as pottery, gla.s.s, and porcelain in East African coastal settlements. The traders waited for favorable winds to let them cross the Indian Ocean directly between East Africa and India. When the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail around the southern cape of Africa and reached the Kenya coast in 1498, he encountered Swahili trading settlements and picked up a pilot who guided him on that direct route to India. 800, Indian Ocean trade becomes well doc.u.mented archaeologically by copious quant.i.ties of Mideastern (and occasionally even Chinese!) products such as pottery, gla.s.s, and porcelain in East African coastal settlements. The traders waited for favorable winds to let them cross the Indian Ocean directly between East Africa and India. When the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama became the first European to sail around the southern cape of Africa and reached the Kenya coast in 1498, he encountered Swahili trading settlements and picked up a pilot who guided him on that direct route to India.

But there was an equally vigorous sea trade from India eastward, between India and Indonesia. Perhaps the Austronesian colonists of Madagascar reached India from Indonesia by that eastern trade route and then fell in with the westward trade route to East Africa, where they joined with Africans and discovered Madagascar. That union of Austronesians and East Africans lives on today in Madagascar's basically Austronesian language, which contains loan words from coastal Kenyan Bantu languages. But there are no corresponding Austronesian loan words in Kenyan languages, and other traces of Austronesians are very thin on the ground in East Africa: mainly just Africa's possible legacy of Indonesian musical instruments (xylophones and zithers) and, of course, the Austronesian crops that became so important in African agriculture. Hence one wonders whether Austronesians, instead of taking the easier route to Madagascar via India and East Africa, somehow (incredibly) sailed straight across the Indian Ocean, discovered Madagascar, and only later got plugged into East African trade routes. Thus, some mystery remains about Africa's most surprising fact of human geography.