Early farming and pastoralism, or food production, in Africa can be separated into several categories: animals, grains, and tropical plants, all of which prevailed in different places and at different times.
Animal domestication is the earliest recorded, but is highly disputed. Large cattle bones found in Egypt dated to the 10th millennium BP are deemed to be domestic on the basis that they could not have survived without human intervention and were found associated with pottery. The alternative view is that the timing is such that these cattle were wild, and that domestic cattle that arrived in the 8th millennium BP were derived from different Levantine stock. The waters are further muddied by the genetics of African cattle suggesting an independent strain, but this also has its critics.
With the general drying of the Sahara around 5000 BP, herders and their cattle and small stock moved south with the tsetse belts into West and East Africa, and by 2000 BP had reached Southern Africa. The question of hunters becoming food producers without apprenticeship is debated, as is the concept of a Stone Age pastoral or agricultural “Neolithic” in Africa. Although winter rainfall crops, such as wheat and barley, were used in Dynastic Egypt, domestication of grain outside the Nile Valley was considerably later than that of animals, only occurring in the Sahel c. 3800 BP, although wild grains most probably had been collected by herders long before this. The beginnings of tropical plant domestication are more difficult to see, as preservation has made the plant residues hard to find. These plants include yams, rice, and oil-bearing trees. Often, environmental change, such as forest clearing, has to be used as a proxy for farming activities in tropical zones. In addition, the development of iron technology is closely correlated with the spread of farming societies in sub-Saharan Africa after 3000 BP. The history of food production in Africa lags somewhat behind the research done in the Near East and Europe, but genomic work on modern Africans has started in parallel with advanced linguistic work. Ancient DNA will be the next technological input now that the problems of contamination have been successfully addressed.
