What event that began 3000 years ago is linked to the spread of cultures in Africa

By about 3000 B. C., much of the area was desert. The

droughts that have recently affected Africa indicate that the desiccation, or

drying up, of the Sahara is continuing and the desert is growing.

As the Sahara became less habitable, the populations moved north toward

the Mediterranean coast and south into the area of the dry sahel, or fringe,

and, especially, onto the grassy savannas suitable for agriculture and

grazing. Savannas stretch across Africa from the mouth of the Senegal River on

the west coast to Lake Chad and the Upper Nile valley. This broad region, the

Sudan, became a center of cultural development. The movement of peoples into

the Sudan and toward the Nile valley and the Mediterranean set the stage for

major developments in the subsequent history of Africa.

Agriculture, Iron, And The Bantu Peoples

Agriculture may have developed independently in Africa, but many scholars

believe that the spread of agriculture and iron throughout Africa linked that

continent to the major centers of civilization in the Near East and

Mediterranean world. The drying up of the Sahara had pushed many peoples to

the south into sub-Saharan Africa. These were the ancestors of the Negro

peoples. They settled at first in scattered hunting-and-gathering bands,

although in some places near lakes and rivers people who fished, with a more

secure food supply, lived in larger population concentrations. Agriculture

seems to have reached these people from the Near East, since the first

domesticated crops were millets and sorghums whose origins are not African but

West Asian. The route of agricultural distribution may have gone through Egypt

or Ethiopia, which long had contacts across the Red Sea with the Arabian

peninsula. There is evidence of agriculture prior to 3000 B. C.

Once the idea of planting diffused, Africans began to develop their own

crops, such as certain varieties of rice, and they demonstrated a continued

receptiveness to new imports. The proposed areas of the domestication of

African crops lie in a band that extends from Ethiopia across the southern

Sudan to West Africa. Subsequently, other crops, such as bananas, were

introduced from Southeast Asia, and in the 16th century A. D. American crops,

such as maize and manioc, spread widely throughout Africa.