On the Origins and Dissemination of Domesticated Sorghum and Pearl Millet across Africa and into India: a View from the Butana Group of the Far Eastern Sahel

Abstract

Four decades have passed since Harlan and Stemler ( 1976 ) proposed the eastern Sahelian zone as the most likely center of Sorghum bicolor domestication. Recently, new data on seed impressions on Butana Group pottery, from the fourth millennium BC in the southern Atbai region of the far eastern Sahelian Belt in Africa, show evidence for cultivation activities of sorghum displaying some domestication traits. Pennisetum glaucum may have been undergoing domestication shortly thereafter in the western Sahel, as finds of fully domesticated pearl millet are present in southeastern Mali by the second half of the third millennium BC, and present in eastern Sudan by the early second millennium BC. The dispersal of the latter to India took less than 1000 years according to present data. Here, we review the middle Holocene Sudanese archaeological data for the first time, to situate the origins and spread of these two native summer rainfall cereals in what is proposed to be their eastern Sahelian Sudan gateway to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade.

The archaeology and ethnoarchaeology of rain-fed cultivation in arid and hyper-arid North Africa

“…As both the entire plant (before the grains mature) and the by-products from grain-processing can also be used as fodder, millets are well suited for mixed agro-pastoral systems. Pearl millet is a critical West Africa crop, and the Sahel zone south of the Sahara is an important area for its domestication (D'Andrea & Casey 2002;Winchell et al 2018). It is particularly suitable for rain-fed cultivation in hyper-arid areas, as it is well adapted to soil with low fertility and to high temperatures, and is able to grow with as little as 40mm of water per annum.…”

New findings on the significance of Jebel Moya in the eastern Sahel

“…It is apparent that different ways of life were followed in different parts of the Sudan and the eastern Sahelian belt during later prehistory. In the Nilotic Nubian Neolithic (4500–3000 BC), people fished (hooks), herded livestock (cattle, goat, sheep) and utilised wild sorghum and millet (little or no cultivation) (Winchell et al . 2018).…”

“…Sorghum is the most important traditional cereal in Africa, but its domestication is less well documented archaeologically than other global cereals such as barley, maize, rice and wheat. Recently, studies of sorghum chaff imprints in ceramics and other clay artefacts have pushed back domestication processes to 3500–3000 BC at KG23 near the Atbara River (eastern Sudan) (Winchell et al 2017, 2018; Fuller and Stevens 2018), with somewhat later evidence for probable mixed cultivation of sorghum and pearl millet by c . 1850 BC from K1 (Kassala, Sudan) (Beldados et al .…”

Chromosome-Scale Genome Assembly Provides Insights into Speciation of Allotetraploid and Massive Biomass Accumulation of Elephant Grass (Pennisetum purpureumSchum.)

“…The elephant grass species (A'A'BB, 2n=4x=28) was originated in East Africa by natural hybridization between two diploid progenitors, the pearl millet (P. glaucum，AA, 2n=14) and an unknown species, according to fossil and cytogenetic clues 14 . Pearl millet has been domesticated as an edible grain that is cropped specifically in arid regions in Africa and India where the other grains failed to reproduce seeds because of too little rainfall.…”