Steven Goldstein, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, researchers at several other universities, and Dr. Emmanuel Ndiema, the head of earth sciences at the National Museums of Kenya, co-authored a new study published on July 10 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers analyzed archaeobotanical evidence, plant remains, to study the history of African crops and plant farming. They focused their studies on Kakapel Rockshelter located in western Kenya. Kakapel is comprised of the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from the interior of eastern Africa.
It wasn’t until recently that researchers were able to obtain these plant remains, through which they are now able to identify when and where these crops got their start. They accurately identified that crops such as cowpea were introduced 2300 years ago. They also have direct evidence of the introduction of finger millet, sorghum, and green peas nearly 1000 years ago. Through these seeds of archaeological evidence, we now understand that farming systems spread to East Africa bit by bit instead of all at once and were adapted to community needs along the way.
“These discoveries show how important African crops were for food security in the past,” says Goldstein, “and draws attention to their potential role for the future. We hope this is a topic that will be of broad interest in Kenya.”
For more information and to see the researcher's full findings, you can visit the Proc. of the Royal Society B.’s website.
They were also featured in a Popular Science article on Wednesday.