Credited to Libya. Dairying itself began earlier in the Near East. The Libyan claim is to the earliest dated dairying in Africa, not to the invention of dairying.
How it began
Around 7,000 years ago, herders using the Takarkori rock shelter in the Tadrart Acacus Mountains of southwestern Libya processed dairy fats in unglazed pottery. A team led by the University of Bristol, working with Sapienza University of Rome, reported the finding in Nature in June 2012. It called this the first identification of dairying practices on the African continent, reliably dated to the fifth millennium BCE. The study does not claim that dairying was invented there.
Before it existed
About 10,000 years ago the Sahara was wetter and greener. Hunter-gatherers in the region lived a semi-sedentary life, used pottery, hunted wild game and collected wild cereals. Between about 7,000 and 5,000 years ago, as the region became more arid, people adopted a more nomadic, pastoral way of life, as cattle bones in cave deposits and river camps suggest.
How it works
Milk fats soak into the walls of unglazed pots and can survive for millennia. The researchers extracted fatty acids from the Takarkori pottery and used lipid biomarker and stable carbon isotope analysis to tell dairy fats from other animal fats. Half of the vessels tested had been used to process dairy fats. Nature's news report noted that North Africans may have been making yogurt 7,000 years ago.
What changed first
The result confirmed for the first time the early presence of domesticated cattle in the region and the importance of milk to its pastoral people. Saharan rock art includes many images of cattle, and a few scenes of milking, but it can rarely be dated reliably, and cattle bones are too scarce at the sites to reconstruct herd structures. The pottery residues supplied the direct proof that had been missing.
What lasted
The finding gives background for the evolution of the lactase persistence gene, which appears to have arisen once prehistoric people began consuming milk products. The gene is found in Europeans and in some Central African groups. The authors say this supports arguments that people moved with their cattle from the Near East into eastern Africa in the early to middle Holocene, around 8,000 years ago.
