Featured: Cattle in the Sahara

Mathilda corrects Luigi on cattle domestication:

“Mathilda goes on to hypothesize that cattle domestication may have started in the Sahara — before the growing of crops…”

Not really…

I point out that domesticated cattle only start appearing in Africa along with the Neolithic expansion from Asia and match the expansion of the Asian domesticates (other posts). The cattle at Nabta were probably captured and ‘kept’ from wild and not domesticated, like the Barbary sheep at Afada. Possibly to secure food for hard times or to make sure they had a cow to sacrifice on ritual days. There’s no evidence from the African languages or expansion patterns of morphologically domesticated cattle bones that cattle were ever domesticated in the Sahara until the concept had arrived from Asia.

Other relevant posts from Mathilda include this and this.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *