Repost: Alt Left: The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Repost from the old site. Great stuff. Theorizes that the birth of the modern Black race only goes back 6-12,000 years and speculates on how it developed in conjunction with primitive agriculture. Also suggests that Black Africans were probably the first agriculturalists on Earth.

The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Hang out long enough on White Nationalist fora, and after a while you will be amazed at how many White racists actually believe that Black Africans were Stone Age people who had no metalworking, no agriculture and no civilization of any sort by the time the Europeans contacted them.

It’s true that Africa is not known for its incredible cultural achievements. But it wasn’t exactly a complete backwater either. The White Nationalist line that Africans were a Paleolithic people with only stone implements and no agriculture is surprisingly widespread. Too bad it is horribly wrong.

First of all, agriculture comes to the Sahel as early as 9000 BC. It comes to West Africa around the same time. Later it goes to Southern and Eastern Africa. The “Niggers are too stupid to grow food” line, appalling in its stupidity, continues to retain a lot of currency. Africans have been growing food for 1000’s of years.

The latest permutation has to do with Zimbabwe. Ruined by US and UK sanctions that have completely shut the nation out of the international trade and banking system, the economy is imploding and people are starving.

Instead of blaming imperialism, White racists blame those dumb niggers for overthrowing White rule and confiscating White farms where 5,000 White farmers had 50% of agricultural land and all of the good land. With the Whites thrown off the land, the narrative goes, these dumb niggers were too stupid to even figure out how to grow food.

They need Homo Blancas Superiorus to show them how to plant seeds and hoe rows. Without White Johnny Appleseeds to grow the food for them that they are too stupid to grow for themselves, the dumb niggers in Africa will all starve to death.

Incredible.

All over Africa, there are hardly any Whites left. Blacks are growing food all over Africa, in every country, in vast numbers. Black Africans are surely smart enough to figure out how to grow food to eat.

In order to look into this story in greater depth, we need to look at the development of Blacks in Africa from an anthropological point of view. The story of Stone Age Africans with no agriculture until Whitey shows up is nonsense.

White Nationalists counter that African Blacks, even over 10,000 years ago, were too stupid to figure out how to grow stuff on their own, so they had to learn from superior Caucasian North Africans. This theory is humorous because in general, White Nationalists refer to North African Caucasians (Berbers and Egyptians) as non-Whites.

Furthermore, at over 10,000 years ago, I’m not sure it matters how Black Africans got agriculture. Cultural diffusion occurs everywhere, and true innovation is pretty hard to pin down. Finally, there is not a lot of evidence that North African Caucasians innovated agriculture at such an early date themselves. As a result, the whole discussion is rendered academic as just another way for racist Whites to kick the Black man while he’s down.

First of all, the original Africans looked like Pygmies or Khoisan (Bushmen). From 6,000-12,000 years ago, Pygmy-Khoisan types traverse from archaic types to the modern Blacks we know today. Modern Blacks are a young race. Pygmies and Khoisan resemble our oldest human ancestors. They have light brown skin and gracile, child-like bodies.

Modern Blacks mostly speak languages related to a huge family called Niger-Congo. During the transition from archaic to modern Blacks, modern Blacks developed agriculture. Blacks had agriculture or proto-agriculture possibly as early as 10,000 years ago when Proto-Niger-Congo first started breaking up.

This means that Black Africans were actually some of the first agriculturalists on Earth. Sango Region hunter-gatherers were the first Blacks to develop agriculture. At first they protected wild grain fields, and then made clearings for wild yams and oil palms. At 12,000 years before present (YBP) they were already using hoes that they made, and at 8-9,000 YBP, they were tending pili nut trees with agricultural implements.

There are agricultural terms in reconstructed Proto-Niger-Congo from before 10,000 YBP, so they must have had some form of agriculture. Mande  is a branch  of Niger-Congo. Proto-Mande speakers inhabited the Niger’s headwaters at the Mali-Guinea border near the modern city of Bamako, and they were the first group to break off from Proto-Niger-Congo.

 

Modern Black Africans are associated with the spread of agriculture in Africa at this time, and this agricultural spread is also located at the headwaters of the Niger, because this is the cradle of the Sudanic Food Complex.

Also, agriculture independently evolved in West Africa (African yams, kola nut) and Ethiopia (coffee, tef) during the period of 4,000-9,000 YBP.

Animal husbandry was widely adopted, and by 7,200 YBP, the Sahel had a full array of food production (cultivated crops, animal husbandry) before this full array was developed in Egypt. So the movement of agriculture in its full array from North African Caucasians to Sahelian Blacks is shown to be a lie.

It’s true that Africa south of the Equator lagged behind, and White Nationalists love to go about this, but the truth is that there were no animals to domesticate down there, nor were there any plants to domesticate either.

It’s doubtful that the Sahelian Blacks were any smarter than the ones south of Equator. They were just better positioned to receive animals for husbandry from Southwest Asia, and they had plants that could be domesticated.

Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels along with more robust body types. See the prior post for more on that.

The first real classical Black Negroid skeleton dates to only 6,500 YBP. Before that, at 12,000 YBP, they look more like the San or Pygmies. Within 6,000 years as Africans moved to agriculture, Blacks changed from gracile archaic types to robust Negroid types. At 6,000-7,000 YBP, the agricultural transition was full.

In contrast to Afrocentric hokum about Black Athena and Black Egypt, modern Blacks do not appear in Egyptian paintings before 4,000 YBP. Before that, the Blacks in northeast Africa, Nubia and Ethiopia were more gracile San (Bushmen) types.

Modern Blacks reach the middle Nile by around 4,000 YBP. At 3,000 YBP, the Bantus spread from Cameroon all through East, Central and Southern Africa, of course bringing agriculture, and yes, iron-making, with them.

Nubians do not obtain their modern Black appearance until 2,700 years ago. Before that, the Nubians and presumably the Hamites look like today’s Egyptians.

Black populations in Africa do not bode well for Philippe Rushton’s R-K Theory. The oldest African populations of all, the Pygmies and the San, with presumably some of the lowest IQ’s (the San have IQ’s of about 54), are very highly K-selected.

They have low fecundity (are not very fertile) and very long intervals between births. This is normally what is expected of a super-K-selected group such as NE Asians, and is said to be associated with high IQ. Yet in the San, it is associated with the lowest IQ’s on Earth. Rushton’s theory does not smell right.

References

Rushton, J. P. 1995. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.