7000–3000 BCE: (What Africa Received from Eurasia — Goats and Sheep Diffusing from the Levant to Northeastern Africa as Early as the Seventh Millennium BCE a…

7000–3000 BCE: (What Africa Received from Eurasia — Goats and Sheep Diffusing from the Levant to Northeastern Africa as Early as the Seventh Millennium BCE and Eventually Spreading Widely Across the Continent, Levantine Crops Including Barley and Early Wheat Varieties Diffusing Along the Northern Mediterranean Fringe and to Irrigated Parts of Egypt like the Fayum by the Seventh and Sixth Millennia, and a Further Spread of Wheat Barley and Chickpeas Southeastward into the Ethiopian Highlands Probably in the Fourth Millennium Before the Full Drying of the Sahara): Ehret is scrupulously honest about what flowed in the other direction. Significant agricultural innovations did, in more limited ways, spread from Eurasia to Africa. Two notable animals, goats and sheep, along with additional cattle, had diffused from the Levant to northeastern Africa as early as the seventh millennium BCE, and sheep and goats in particular eventually became important and spread widely across most of the continent. But beyond livestock, other Eurasian contributions had a less wide impact. By the seventh and sixth millennia BCE, Levantine crops — notably barley and early wheat varieties — were diffusing along the northern fringe of the continent, where the Mediterranean climate and winter rains made their cultivation viable, and to some parts of Egypt such as the Fayum, where irrigation made it possible. Sometime before the full drying of the Sahara, probably in the fourth millennium, a further spread of these crops — wheat, barley, and chickpeas — passed southeastward into the highlands of the Horn of Africa, to modern-day Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, where the cool-season rains of the highlands provided conditions much like those of the Mediterranean. The key word in Ehret’s assessment is “limited.” Eurasian contributions to Africa were real, but they were geographically constrained — confined mostly to the Mediterranean fringe, the Nile corridor, and the Ethiopian highlands. They did not transform the agricultural economies of the continent’s vast interior the way African crops transformed the economies of South Asia. The exchange was genuine but deeply asymmetric, and the asymmetry ran in Africa’s favor.