An article dedicated to the issue of cattle domestication in Africa has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. According to the currently accepted viewpoint, cattle were domesticated in the middle Euphrates region around 11,000 years ago and then spread to Africa through the Sinai Peninsula, along with small ruminants, around the 7^th to 6^th millennium BC. However, the research of a Polish-Norwegian team led by Professor Marta Osypińska from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Wrocław has revived the hypothesis that cattle were initially domesticated in Africa, as was proposed half a century ago based on the results of excavations at Nabta Playa in southwestern Egypt.

The specialists examined animal remains found during two seasons of archaeological excavations at the Letti Desert 2 (LTD-2) site in northern Sudan, which is located between the Nile River’s Third and Fourth Cataracts. While only the bones of adult wild animals were found, a significant number of cattle bones found at LTD-2 were from animals aged between six months and four years old. This suggests that the young animals were deliberately culled due to an excess of juveniles, which is a primary indicator that domesticated ruminant animals were being raised, according to the authors of the study. Radiocarbon dating has established that the bones are 7,000 years old, which makes it possible to identify the central Sahel as an independent centre of cattle domestication. This hypothesis can only be confirmed or refuted by expanding the archaeozoological database during the course of archaeological research in Sub-Saharan African countries.

New data on the question of African cattle domestication has also been obtained thanks to the work of the Nubian Archaeological and Anthropological Expedition of Moscow State University’s Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology. During the sixth season of field research, which was conducted from January to March 2025, ritual burials of three caws, a bull, a sheep and a goat were discovered and examined in the Onib Depression. According to the expedition’s director, Alexei A. Krol, who is a Senior Researcher at MSU Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology and an Oikoumene’s Editorial Board Member, archaeologists investigated only a portion of the ritual burial complex, which has been preliminarily dated to the 6^th to 5^th millennium BC based on a vessel found in one of the burial sites. Archaeologists plan to continue studying the ritual complex in the next season.

Source: https://www.micahalbert.com/print-sales/south-sudan-cattle