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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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.
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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