West African Cradle of Farming: a very brief timeline and bibliography

Decades of long hours of study off the beaten path and travels and life experiences reveals knowledge hidden or suppressed to maintain social inequalities.

The Semites are an African people. Semitic is spoken nowhere in Asia unless introduced by religious conversions. I don't count the Arabian Peninsula as part of Asia because geological history will not allow it. The Rift Valley runs from Mozambique to Syria.

It's funny that some linguists would speak of a proto-Semitic language as if it were ancestral to all Afro-Asian languages. Semitic was actually the last to separate from the phyla roughly 6000 years ago whereas Kushitic became distinct 10,000 years ago.

The Afro-Asiatic language family developed in the region of Ethiopia and Somalia and began splitting at least 8000 years ago.

Branches and date of split:

Kushitic	-	8th millenium BCE
Egyptian	-	before the 7th millenium BCE
Omotic	-	7th millenium BCE
Hausa	-	7th millenium BCE
Semitic	-	6th or 5th millenia BCE
Amazight	-	6th or 5th millenia BCE

The independent invention of agriculture in West Africa and Semitic languages belonging to the Afro-Asian language family originating in Ethiopia, has been known for half a century but seems new. Here is a synopsis and sources for West African farming. Let me know what you think of these books sometime. Enjoy :)

Words in the reconstructed proto Niger-Congo language spoken 8000 BCE indicate some primitive agriculture was going on.

C. Ehret & M. Posansky (editors)
The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Proliferation of pili nut leaves from the south of modern Ghana 5000 BCE imply that this otherwise wild plant was aided in its growth by human effort.

J. D. Clark & S. A. Brandt (editors)
From Hunters to Farmers
Berkeley: Univerisity of California Press 1984

Hunter-gatherers were overlooking wild grain fields and making clearings so that oil palms and wild yams could grow unentangled.

J. V. S. Megaw (editor)
Hunters, Gatherers and First Farmers Beyond Europe
Leicester: Leicester University Press 1977

T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B.Andah & A.Okpoko (editors)
The Archaeology of Africa: foods, metals and towns
London: Routledge 1993

By 4000 BCE an agricultural complex including millet, sorghum and peas among others shows an invention of cultivation that owed nothing to the so-called Southwest Asian farming complex was in full development by Mande speakers along the Niger.

G. P. Murdock
Africa: its peoples and their culture history.
New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company 1959