10,000–6000 BCE: (The Global Map of Independent Agricultural Origins — Peoples in Numerous Different Regions Around the World Separately and Independently Br…

10,000–6000 BCE: (The Global Map of Independent Agricultural Origins — Peoples in Numerous Different Regions Around the World Separately and Independently Bringing Cultivation into Being Between 10,000 and 6000 BCE, Three Independent Centers in Africa Alone: West Africa with Fonio, the Farther Eastern Sahara with Sorghum, and the Southwestern Ethiopian Highlands with Enset and Ethiopian Yams, Five Centers in the Americas, Four in Eurasia, and One in Interior New Guinea): Peoples living in numerous different regions all around the globe separately and independently brought this defining new kind of economy into being between 10,000 and 6000 BCE — in Africa, Eurasia, and the Americas, as well as in interior New Guinea. The origination regions of cultivation included, in Africa alone, three independent centers: West Africa with fonio; separately, the farther eastern Sahara regions with sorghum; and, again separately, the southwestern Ethiopian Highlands with enset and Ethiopian yams. Independent originating centers of agriculture in the Americas included northern Mexico with pumpkin; Central America and southern Mexico with maize and squash; highland South America with potato; northern lowland South America with sweet potatoes, peanuts, and American yams; and also, somewhat later at around 5000 BCE, today’s eastern central United States with sunflower and squash. Eurasian centers included northern China with foxtail millet; southern China with rice; the hill country of the Fertile Crescent with wheat and barley; and possibly also three areas of India. Interior New Guinea, with taro and banana, was still another early independent originating center. The global map is staggering in its implications. At least thirteen independent centers of agricultural invention, scattered across every inhabited continent — and three of them in Africa. The standard textbook narrative, which treats the Fertile Crescent as the singular birthplace of agriculture and then traces its diffusion outward to the rest of the world, is not merely incomplete. It is a fiction that erases twelve of the thirteen centers in order to privilege one. Africa did not receive agriculture from the Near East. Africa invented agriculture three times over, with three different crop complexes, in three different ecological zones, among three different language communities. The fonio farmers of West Africa owed nothing to Mesopotamia. The sorghum cultivators of the eastern Sahara owed nothing to the Levant. The enset growers of the Ethiopian Highlands owed nothing to anyone. They were innovators in their own right, responding to their own environmental conditions with their own creative solutions.