Pearl Millet and the Kuk Swamp: A Narrative Review of the Sahel's and New Guinea's Agricultural Origins
Year: 2026
Type: review
Abstract: Two of agriculture's hearths lie outside the classical trio's shadow: the West African Sahel, whose pearl millet was domesticated across the sand plains south of the Sahara, and the New Guinea highlands, whose taro and banana were cultivated in drainage ditches millennia before contact. This article presents a narrative review of their literature. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the centers-and-noncenters frame, in which Harlan's diffuse-origins model, Neumann's African synthesis, and Marshall and Hildebrand's cattle-before-crops thesis reframed the continent's food production --- no fixed centers, but mosaics; the Sahel's pearl millet, in which Manning's Tilemsi dating, Kahlheber and Neumann's semi-arid synthesis, and the archaeobotanical record fixed the millet's domestication pathway --- a cereal tamed between the fourth and third millennia BCE, spreading with herders and pearls of grain; and Sahul's highlands, in which Denham's Kuk Swamp datings, the Antiquity revisions, Golson's and Yen's syntheses, Perrier's banana genomics, Lebot's biomolecular evidence, and Denham's rethinking agriculture connected the ditches to the crops --- New Guinea's independent neolithic, seven thousand years deep. It is concluded that the two literatures teach the frame's lesson: agriculture's origins are plural and diffuse, and the Sahel's and New Guinea's records --- built on charred grain and swampy phytoliths --- are the proof that farming invented itself wherever plants and people coevolved.
Authors: Revista, Zen, HISTORY, 10
Institution: Faculdades Guarulhos
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204765644