9700–5500 BCE: (Population Spread Not Limited to Farmers Replacing Foragers — The Climatic Shifts of the Early Holocene Also Opening New Opportunities for Ex…

9700–5500 BCE: (Population Spread Not Limited to Farmers Replacing Foragers — The Climatic Shifts of the Early Holocene Also Opening New Opportunities for Expanded and More Varied Exploitation of Wild Food Resources, the First Wide Distribution of Nilo-Saharan-Speaking Peoples Having Been Driven Not by Agriculture but by Their Elaborated Aquatic Foraging Economy, Food Production Being the Most Consequential but Not the Only Engine of Demographic Expansion in the Early Holocene): This scale of population spread has not been a phenomenon limited solely to the increase of farmers at the expense of foragers. The climatic shifts that initiated the Holocene epoch had the potential of opening up new opportunities for an expanded and more varied exploitation of wild food resources as well. The first wide distribution of Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples was driven not by agriculture but by their elaborated aquatic foraging economy — the Aquatic Civilization that carried Nilo-Saharan speakers westward along the waterways of the green Sahara into Lake Mega-Chad and beyond. The conventional narrative of the Neolithic revolution treats the transition from foraging to farming as a clean break — a before and after, with foraging as the primitive past and farming as the civilized future. But the reality was far more complex. Some of the most consequential population expansions of the early Holocene were driven not by farming but by intensified foraging — by the development of more productive ways of exploiting wild resources. The Nilo-Saharan Aquatic expansion is the prime African example: a continental-scale demographic transformation powered not by sowing and reaping but by fishing and hippo hunting. The lesson is that human ingenuity in the face of environmental change takes many forms, and the shift to food production, transformative as it was, was only one of the strategies that early Holocene peoples deployed to exploit the new opportunities that a changing climate presented.