(http://www.tulane.edu/lester/images/Ancient.World/Egypt/A52.gif)
From: Bernard R Ortiz-de ()
Subject: cattle and Africa
Sent On: 05/30 02:17 PM PM ET
Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 14:15:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bernard R Ortiz-de-Montellano [bortiz@cms.cc.wayne.edu]
Sender: owner-athena-discuss@info.harpercollins.com
[owner-athena-discuss@info.harpercollins.com]
Subject: cattle and Africa
I thought this would interest the list. Evidence. in the latest edition of
*Science* 272: 1105 (May 24, 19916) suggests that Africans domesticated
cattle independently
"Early African societies, many researchers have contended, didn't develop
the trappings of modern civilization-- money and kingship, for instance--
on their own, but imported them from Eurasia. One reason to believe so was
that the first clear signs of domesticated cattle-- a major source of
wealth in early societies - appear in the archaeological record in the Near
East some 9000 years ago. But now some geneticists studying DNA in modern
cattle have found evidence that Africans may have indeed begun raising
cattle independently.
Daniel Bradley and co-workers at Trinity college in Dublin, Ireland, report
in last week's *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* that they
looked at mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) samples from 90 cattle belonging to 13
breeds in India, Europe, and Africa. MtDNA mutates at a regular rate, so
differences among breeds, researchers think, can be used as a "molecular
clock" to date their divergence from a common ancestor.
The team had already found evidence that Indian cattle broke off from a
lineage that led to the Near Eastern stock 200,000 years ago, suggesting
there was a second domestication site in India (*Science,* 15 April 1994,
p. 343). And now it seems the ancestral cluster split again, about 22,000
to 26,000 years ago, into groups that gave rise to modern African and
European cattle.
This split means that cattle wandered into Africa long before researchers
had thought they did and remained a distinct group. And that suggests,
Bradley says, that Africans domesticated cattle on their own.
The new results challenge the view that African societies depended on the
near East to develop, notes anthropologist Alison Brooks of George
Washington University. "A lot of people don't want to ascribe any
independent discoveries to Africa," Brooks says. Fred Wendorf of Southern
Methodist University in Dallas adds that independent invention could help
explain why Africans, unlike Eurasians, traditionally used cattle for milk
and blood, and seldom for meat."
Bernard Ortiz de Montellano
bortiz@cms.cc.wayne.edu
An Egyptian comb from the Predynastic/Old Kingdom period. This
type of comb is similar to that used amongst other African peoples.
(http://www.teleport.com/~ddonahue/graphics/comb3.gif)
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