8000–6000 BCE: (Nilo-Saharan Pastoralists of the Eastern Sahara — During the Proto-Northern Sudanic, Proto-Saharo-Sahelian, and Proto-Sahelian Eras of the Ei…

8000–6000 BCE: (Nilo-Saharan Pastoralists of the Eastern Sahara — During the Proto-Northern Sudanic, Proto-Saharo-Sahelian, and Proto-Sahelian Eras of the Eighth and Seventh Millennia BCE, Nilo-Saharan Peoples of the Southern and Eastern Sahara Beginning to Protect Cattle and Then Taking Up Full Herding of Cattle Along with Newly Introduced Sheep and Goats by the Late Seventh Millennium, Initially Collectors of Wild Grains but by the Later Eighth Millennium Beginning the Shift from Collecting to Cultivating Sorghum and Possibly Pearl Millet, as Evidenced by Linguistic Reconstruction and the Archaeological Presence of Granaries): The mid-Holocene phase of drier climate in the later seventh and sixth millennia BCE shifted the balance of subsistence advantage away from the Aquatic communities and toward other Nilo-Saharan-speaking communities that had long relied on dry-land food resources. During the successive proto-Northern Sudanic, proto-Saharo-Sahelian, and proto-Sahelian eras of the eighth and seventh millennia BCE, these particular Nilo-Saharan peoples of the southern and eastern Sahara appear to have begun to protect cattle and then, over the course of the late seventh millennium, took up the full herding of cattle as well as of the newly introduced sheep and goats. At first collectors of wild grains, by the later eighth millennium they appear — from the linguistic evidence and indirectly from the archaeological presence of granaries — to have begun the shift from collecting to cultivating sorghum and possibly other grains such as pearl millet. The transition from grain collecting to grain cultivating among Nilo-Saharan speakers was not a sudden revolution but a gradual intensification, driven by the same mid-Holocene drying that was undermining the Aquatic economy to the west. As the waterways shrank and the fish stocks declined, the communities that had invested in dry-land resources — cattle herding, grain cultivation — found themselves at an increasing advantage. The proto-Sahelian speakers were not passive victims of climate change. They were active adapters, building an agropastoral economy that combined cattle herding with sorghum cultivation, an economy that would prove so successful that it would spread across the entire Sahel belt within the next two millennia. The foundations of the great pastoral civilizations of the Sahel — from the Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples of Sudan to the Fulani of West Africa — were laid in the eastern Sahara in the eighth and seventh millennia BCE, by people responding to environmental pressure with an innovation that would reshape the demographic and cultural map of an entire continent.