Looking beyond history: tracing the dispersal of the Malaysian complex of crops to Africa

Abstract

In his 1959 book, Africa: Its Peoples and Their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that a Malaysian complex of crops dispersed to Africa in ancient times across the Indian Ocean along the Sabaean Lane. The Malaysian complex comprised bananas, sugarcane, taro, three yam species, rice, Polynesian arrowroot, breadfruit, coconut, areca palm, and betel leaf. Except for rice, arrowroot, and potentially taro, most of these crops were domesticated in the Island Southeast Asia-New Guinea region, from where they dispersed to Africa. Our reassessment of agronomic, archaeological, classical, genetic, and historical sources shows that we need to go beneath standard historical narratives to recover a much more ancient and complex history of crop introductions to Africa. Despite considerable uncertainty and fragmented research, we were able to conclude that the Malaysian complex of crops did not arrive in Africa as a complete assemblage at one time or along one route. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that these crops arrived in Africa at different times and followed different pathways of introduction to the continent.

Interspecific introgression patterns reveal the origins of worldwide cultivated bananas in New Guinea

“…Archeological investigations at the Kuk Swamp site in PNG suggested that bananas were intensively cultivated there at least 6950 to 6440 years ago (Denham et al., 2003). In addition, Mchare and Plantain cultivars are believed to have been transported from the SEA–New Guinea region to Africa in a proposed time frame of 1000 to 3000 years ago, depending on evidence and sources (Grimaldi et al., 2022; Perrier et al., 2019). The conserved schizocarpa / banksii and zebrina / banksii breakpoints between some PNG diploid cultivars and Mchare or Plantains cultivars suggest that introgression events associated with these breakpoints took place at least 1000 years ago.…”

Archaeobotanical futures in the Indo‐Pacific

“…Star anise, together with other trade items, was transported in trade networks spanning China, mainland Southeast Asia and Island Southeast Asia at this time. These trade networks represent a later manifestation of much earlier networks that connected Island Southeast Asia with these regions for millennia (Donohue & Denham, 2010; Solheim, 2006), and plausibly extended around the Indian Ocean (Grimaldi et al., 2022; Power et al., 2019).…”

Identifying archaeological parenchyma in three dimensions: Diagnostic assessment of five important food plant species in the Indo‐Pacific region

“…Plausibly, people engaged in various forms of domesticatory relationship with taro populations across the Indo-Pacific region, leading to the development of various cultiwild (namely, cultivated wild-types) and proto-domesticated forms, from which a few major diploid and triploid cultivar groups derived (Li, 1970;Denham, 2018Denham, , 2020. Prior to European exploration taro cultivation extended across the globe from Japan in the north to New Zealand in the south, and from Southern Europe in the west to Polynesia in the east (Leon, 1977;Matthews, 2014;Grimaldi et al, 2018Grimaldi et al, , 2022.…”