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Malaria and the Peopling of Early Tropical Africa*
JAMES L. A. WEBB JR.
Colby College
| The first chapters in human prehistory are the story of early humanity in tropical Africa. Over long epochs of foraging, our ancestors gradually developed tools, adapted to new environments, and created more complex material culture. The internal dynamics of the early epochs of the human past in tropical Africa, however, have remained relatively obscure. By contrast, the rapid advances of humanity in regions outside of tropical Africa during the extended Neolithic agricultural revolution are generally agreed to mark a revolutionary break with the early epochs. For this reason, it is customary for world historians, after acknowledging a long history of human foraging, to begin the teaching of world history with the agrarian era, some ten or eleven thousand years ago.1 |
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This essay synthesizes research findings in the fields of microbiology, archaeology, and archaeobotany to explore the significance of malaria on the peopling of early tropical Africa, before the Common Era. Malaria emerged as a human disease in tropical Africa, and over the long run of humankind on earth, it has likely killed more Africans than any other disease. This essay advances evidence that human genetic responses to malarial infections in early tropical Africa constitute the earliest known chapters in the human experience with infectious disease, revising the idea that the first accommodations to infectious disease environments took place in the agricultural settlements in the fertile river basins of northern Africa and southern and eastern Eurasia. It also advances a new interpretation of the colonization of much of tropical Africa during the fifth to first millennia B.C.E. demographic processes known as the "Bantu expansions." It contends that human accommodations to endemic malarial infections—in conjunction with the practice of yam and plantain vegeculture—resulted in an "immunological gradient" between rainforest villagers and foragers that played a major role in the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples. This interpretation revises older interpretations that have stressed the role of iron making and political violence and supplements newer interpretations that have focused on cultural and linguistic evidence. This synthesis argues against the significance of diffusionist influences and for a more integrated theory of the peopling of early tropical Africa. |
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Tropical Africa and Human Disease History | |
| In 1976, William H. McNeill published Plagues and Peoples, a highly influential synthesis of the history of human disease. In it the author argued that the disease environment of tropical Africa held a special significance for understanding early human history. The tropical African disease environment was extremely difficult, owing to the sheer variety of parasites that preyed upon human beings and of vector-borne diseases to which human beings were subject. Indeed, the first great advance in human health was the successful exodus of some human pioneers from tropical Africa. Outside of the African tropics, human emigrants discovered that they had left the ecological zones in which some of the most virulent vector-borne diseases were endemic and that as a result their disease burden was lighter. This improvement in health or, put differently, this increase in reproductive fitness, in turn led to more rapid population growth and ultimately to the establishment of settled communities, marking the most important transition—the agricultural revolution—in the long prehistory of humankind.2 |
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