Genesis and development of pastoralism in Sahara and North Africa

Millions of people in Africa rely in pastoral activity. Cattle, camels, donkeys, sheep, goats and other domestic animals provide meat, milk, skin, labour, manure, fuel - to name just a few contributions of livestock to peoples daily lives. The social ideology of herders, in East and West Africa in particular, focuses on cattle, and the richness and diversity of pastoral adaptation in Africa reflect a long tradition reaching back to the early Holocene. The study of the emergence and development of pastoralism is a major domain of of Africanist research, which has attracted the attention of several scholars over time. However, large parts of the debate over recent decades has been absorbed by the hypothesis of autonomous domestication of in southern Egypt. This chapter collates all the updated information on the beginning and expansion of herding, focusing on cattle, sheep and goats in North Africa, with a view to synthesizing the main socio-cultural features, and provides a few hints for future research