vMurdock
(1959) was the first author who pointed to the historical enigma presented by SE Asian food crops in Africa.
vAt
the period when Austronesian navigators were presumably reaching the East African coast (before 2000 BP), its only inhabitants would have been Cushite pastoralists, and Khoesan-related groups with a hunting-gathering economy. Neither of these are likely
candidates for the transmission of
vegetatively reproducing crops requiring
elaborate agricultural skills.
vMurdock’s
answer to this was to postulate a ‘Yam Belt’, a corridor with its Easternmost tip in Southern Somalia, passing North of the Equatorial forest, as far as the
Kru and other coastal
tuber-growers in the West of West Africa.
vMurdock’s
candidates for the adoption and transmission of these cultigens were a people he calls ‘Megalithic Cushites’, then said to be inhabiting the Highlands of Southern Ethiopia.