1
2	The end of the Pleistocene in the Sahara The Late Pleistocene arid episode ended in the Sahara around 12,000 BP. It has generally been accepted that the climate improves after this. Recent research (just presented by Nick Drake) suggests that the Sahara developed a network of rivers and lakes relatively rapidly and then gradually aridified, reaching its present status
3	Pleistocene Sahara biogeography I Two types of fauna would have been able to take advantage of this new resource niche; aquatic species that depend on continuous water bodies and savannah mammals that can cross open plains but must drink regularly Examples of aquatic species are hippo, crocodile, Arvicanthus sp., cane rat (Thryonomys), fish, hydrophilous amphibians, molluscs, crabs Savannah species include elephant, rhino, giraffe, typical predators and a host of smaller mammals Few examples of birds are clear, but anthropic species such as the guinea-fowl, Numida meleagris, with a relic population in Morocco is a likely trace of this period
4	Pleistocene Sahara biogeography III Many species only appear to have been distributed as far north as the central Sahara whereas some species only spread south from the Maghreb to this point In particular, deepwater species such as the hippo, and the Nile Perch have this distribution, whereas species that can survive with less water make it across the desert So, elephant, giraffe, cichlids, the Nile rat etc. can subsist with shallow pools This line appears to be the ‘watershed’ in the central Sahara
5	Crocodiles
6	Holocene crocodiles
7	Hippo
8	Taking advantage of new resource opportunities If so, then this would have represented a major expansion in huntable and gatherable resources and that these would divide into two major sets; aquatic and plains Specialised foragers could then develop to exploit these different niches, crudely fishing people and plains hunters This paper argues that two different populations might have exploited these resources and that this can be correlated with the expansion of two of Africa’s language phyla; Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo And that this in turn broadly correlates with two archaeological cultures, the spread of serrated bone harpoons and the Ounanian, microlithic points, here interpreted as the spread of the bow and arrow
9	Nilo-Saharan I The Nilo-Saharan languages are found across this region today, although fragmented by the subsequent expansion of Berber. Their greatest area of diversity is in the Ethio-Sudan borderlands where they may have existed as foragers for a long period. The internal structure of the phylum is disputed (Bender vs. Ehret), though not its internal diversity nor the location of that diversity The genealogical ‘tree’ follows Bender which very much corresponds to my own research
10	Nilo-Saharan languages today
11	Nilo-Saharan internal structure
12	Nilo-Saharan The notion that there is a general connection between seriated bone harpoons and Nilo-Saharan goes back to the Aqualithic (1974, 1977) of John Sutton (which however, also co-associates ‘wavy-line’ pottery) However, none of the geomorphological data for a green Sahara, nor our current understanding of the internal structure of the phylum was then available The dispersal of the Western branches of Nilo-Saharan was strongly associated with the opening up of new aquatic resource opportunities A east-west and south-north movement at this period can be tracked through; finds of: bone harpoons fossils rock-paintings of aquatic species such as hippos in what are now arid regions.
13	Seriated bone harpoons
14	Finds of seriated bone harpoons
15	Harpoons and Nilo-Saharan Seriated bone harpoons are generally found below the watershed with the sole exception of the Moroccan one This is treated by Yellen as typologically exceptional and moreover is pre-Holocene It is suggested here that it is essentially unconnected with the harpoons typical of the aquatic expansion The expansion of Nilo-Saharan would only have gone as far as the ‘watershed line’ as these specialised aquatic resource exploiters did not have th technology to survive in the more arid region further north
16	Tilapia in rock-art
17	Nilo-Saharan on the ‘Green Sahara’
18	Is there any actual linguistic data to support this? Nilo-Saharan is much more problematic than Niger-Congo because it is older and more internally fragmented and because its languages remain much less well documented However, it is possible to say that ‘bow’ and ‘arrow’ and ‘spear’ can be reconstructed for proto-Niger-Congo and apparently not for proto-Nilo-Saharan It would be pleasant to have ‘harpoon’ in proto-Nilo-Saharan but the type of specialised vocabulary is not recorded
19	Hippo in Nilo-Saharan
20	Two roots for crocodile in Nilo-Saharan
21	However; The Nilo-Saharan aquatic resource exploiters were not the only populations to take advantage of the newly green Sahara North African hunters with microlithic arrow-points also observe the new abundance of large land mammals to the south, notably elephant, rhino and giraffe This contributes to the ‘Epipalaeolithic’ of Northern Mali, Southern Algeria etc from ca. 10 kya. These populations are called ‘Paleoberber’ in the literature, but there in no evidence they spoke a language were in any way connected with modern Berber
22	Ounanian points
23	Ounanian points (roughly)
24	Giraffes - Air
25	Leopard attacking elephant –Saharan atlas
26	Rhino Hoggar
27	Black rhino Vallard’s map 1547
28	Black rhino in West Africa: records and rock art
29	Niger-Congo and the bow and arrow The introduction of the bow and arrow contributes to a technological and demographic revolution in sub-Saharan Africa And is responsible for the initial phases of the largest language phylum on earth, the Niger-Congo languages whose ‘centre of gravity’ appears to be exactly in the region of the south-central Sahara
30	Bowmen -Acacus
31	Niger-Congo languages today
32	Bow in Niger-Congo
33	Arrow in Niger-Congo
34	Conclusions
35	Where next?
36	Thanks