15,000 BCE–6000 BCE: (Broad Cultural and Economic Continuity in Egypt from the Afian Period into the Holocene — Despite Changes in Particular Elements of Cul…

15,000 BCE–6000 BCE: (Broad Cultural and Economic Continuity in Egypt from the Afian Period into the Holocene — Despite Changes in Particular Elements of Culture and in Patterns of Habitation Caused by Changing Nile Flood Behaviors, the Archaeology Presenting a Picture of Fundamental Continuity, Wilma Wetterstrøm Arguing Thirty Years Ago That This Continuity Lasted Right Through the Transition from Wild Grain Harvesting to the Adoption of Cultivated Grains from the Levant, a View That Continues to Hold in More Recent Studies): Over the whole of the long period from 15,000 BCE down to much later times, changes in particular elements of culture did take place in the lands along and around the Egyptian Nile, and changes also in the patterns of habitation and residence because of shifting Nile flood behaviors. But overall, the archaeology of the Egyptian regions presents a picture of broad cultural and economic continuity extending down from the Afian period into the Holocene epoch. Wilma Wetterstrøm argued thirty years ago that this cultural continuity lasted right through the transition from wild grain harvesting to the adoption of cultivated grains coming from the Levant, and this view continues to hold in more recent studies. In the seventh and sixth millennia, the existing populations of Upper Egypt and, farther north, in the Fayum gradually incorporated new crops and new ways of producing them into their subsistence lives — but without evidence of any notable population intrusions from the Levant into their lands. This is one of the most consequential findings in the archaeology of ancient Egypt, and it demolishes the diffusionist narrative at its foundation. The people who adopted Levantine crops in the seventh and sixth millennia were the same people — the same continuous population — who had been harvesting wild grains since the fifteenth millennium BCE. They did not need outsiders to teach them agriculture. They were already grain harvesters. They simply added domesticated varieties to a subsistence repertoire they had been practicing for eight thousand years. The transition to farming in Egypt was not a revolution imposed from outside. It was an incremental adaptation by a deeply rooted African population that had been working with grain longer than any community in the Levant.