Four decades have passed since Harlan and Stemler (
1976
) proposed the eastern Sahelian zone as the most likely center of
Sorghum bicolor
domestication. Recently, new data on seed impressions on Butana Group pottery, from the fourth millennium BC in the southern Atbai region of the far eastern Sahelian Belt in Africa, show evidence for cultivation activities of sorghum displaying some domestication traits.
Pennisetum glaucum
may have been undergoing domestication shortly thereafter in the western Sahel, as finds of fully domesticated pearl millet are present in southeastern Mali by the second half of the third millennium BC, and present in eastern Sudan by the early second millennium BC. The dispersal of the latter to India took less than 1000 years according to present data. Here, we review the middle Holocene Sudanese archaeological data for the first time, to situate the origins and spread of these two native summer rainfall cereals in what is proposed to be their eastern Sahelian Sudan gateway to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade.
We present the geomorphology of the Southern Atbai Plain (Eastern Sudan) and the western edge of the Eritrean Highlands (Western Eritrea), in the eastern Sahel. The mountainous area consists of Paleo-Proterozoic gneiss and Neo-Proterozoic igneous rocks and meta-volcanic assemblages shaped as inselbergs and whaleback landforms by weathering. Bare-rock hills emerge from a gentle glacis that oversees the Southern Atbai alluvial plain, located between the Atbara and Gash Rivers. The plain features the SSE-NNW-oriented endorheic terminal fan of the Gash River and is crossed by intricate Early to Late Pleistocene paleochannels, whose evolution was controlled by the interplay between Quaternary regional tectonics and arid to humid climatic and environmental oscillations. The map is intended to interpret the evolution of local landscape, thus representing a tool for reconstructing the spatial and temporal distribution of Late Quaternary archaeological features and their functional relationships with the fossil fluvial system and the western foothills.
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