ARCHEOLOGISTS digging in the Sahara Desert of southern Egypt have found 8,000-year-old seeds of sorghum and millet, indicating that the domestication of these important African food crops occurred much earlier than previously thought.
The discovery, reported in the current issue of the journal Nature, provides some of the first direct evidence for the early history of agriculture in a major region other than the Levant or pre-Columbian America. The findings surprised experts because they had assumed that these plants were first domesticated in the African savanna to the south, presumably well after the introduction of cultivated barley and wheat in lower Egypt about 6,400 years ago.
The seeds were found charred and buried in the ruins of a prehistoric settlement 60 miles west of Abu Simbel, on the Nile River near the Sudanese border. The variety of more than 40 different plant seeds showed that vegetation in that region then must have been more abundant than it is now.
The excavations were conducted over the last two years by a team of American and Polish archeologists led by Dr. Fred Wendorf, a professor of archeology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. A Short Step to Planting
Dr. Jack R. Harlan, a retired agronomist from the University of Illinois and an expert on sorghum who advised the archeologists, cautioned that there was still no evidence to support a conclusion that sorghum had been domesticated at this time, though the wild plants were apparently being regularly harvested. But he agreed that the findings indicated the domestication of these crops must have come several thousand years earlier than thought. Previous evidence had dated the domestication of sorghum in Africa at about 1000 B.C.
In their report, Dr. Wendorf and his associates wrote: "The evidence for the intensive use of sorghum and millets some 8,000 years ago indicates that such use first occurred much earlier than previously thought, and took place in what is today a rainless desert. It is a short step from intensive use of wild plants, to planting and protecting these plants, and thus to the genetic changes involved in domestication."
In fact, the archeologists said, infrared analysis of the lipids, or fats, in the sorghum grains revealed that they were closer genetically to modern cultivated plants than to wild ones. In other respects, however, the seeds appeared to be entirely wild, scientists said.
Archeologists generally place the beginning of agriculture at about 10,000 years ago in the regions of present-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Cereal grains began to be harvested intensively there even earlier, about 12,000 years ago. But it was 2,000 years more before there was evidence of domestic varieties of peas, lentils, barley and emmer wheat.
Since there is no evidence that these Levantine plants were introduced into Egypt until 6,400 years ago, Dr. Wendorf's team noted, the new findings suggest that Africans began domesticating plants independently of outside influences.
Map of Egypt highlighting the site of find.