Africans survived climate changes for 10 000 years – lessons for modern times

Imagine living in a place where a single drought, hurricane or mudslide can wipe out your food supply. Across Africa, many communities do exactly that – navigate climate shocks like floods, heatwaves, and failed harvests.What’s often overlooked in the development policies to tackle these threats is a powerful sources of insight: Africa’s own history.Around 14 700 to 5 500 years ago, much of Africa experienced wetter conditions – a time referred to as the African Humid Period. As wet conditions declined around 5 500 years ago, major social, cultural and environmental changes ensued across the continent.We’re part of a multidisciplinary team of scientists who recently published a study about how diverse African communities adapted to climate variability over the past 10 000 years. This is the first study to explore thousands of years of change in people’s livelihoods across the continent using isotopic data.This continent-wide approach offers novel insights into how livelihoods formed and evolved across space and time.Prior theories often assumed that societies and their food systems evolved in a linear way. In other words they developed from simple hunting and gathering communities to politically and socially complex societies practising agriculture.Instead, what we see is a complex mosaic of adaptable strategies that helped people survive. For 10 000 years, African communities adapted by mixing herding, farming, fishing and foraging. They blended different practices based on what worked at different times in their specific environment. That diversity across communities and regions was key to human survival.That has real lessons for food systems today.Our research suggests that rigid, top-down development plans, including ones that privilege intensifying agriculture over diversified economies, are unlikely to succeed. Many modern policies promote narrow approaches, like focusing only on cash crops. But history tells a different story. Resilience isn’t about choosing the “best” or most “intensive” method and sticking with it. Rather it’s about staying flexible and blending different strategies to align with local conditions.The clues left behindWe were able to develop our insights by looking at the clues left behind by the food people ate and the environments they lived in. Our methods illustrated a wide range of livelihood systems. For example, in what are now Botswana and Zimbabwe, some groups combined small-scale farming with wild food gathering and livestock herding after the African Humid Period. In Egypt and Sudan, communities mixed crop farming – focused on wheat, barley, and legumes – with fishing, dairy, and beer brewing. Herders, in particular, developed highly flexible strategies. They adapted to hot plains, dry highlands, and everything in between. Pastoral systems (farming with grazing animals) show up at more archaeological sites than any other food system. They also have the widest range of chemical signatures – evidence of their adaptability to shifting environments.Our study also used isotopic data to build up a picture of how people were using livestock. Most animal management systems were reliant on grasses (plants such as millet and tropical pasture) and adapted to diverse ecological conditions. Some systems were highly specialised to semi-arid and mountainous environments. Others included mixed herds adapted to wetter or lower elevation regions. In other cases, animals were kept as stock in small numbers to supplement other livelihoods – providing milk, dung, and insurance against crop failure.This adaptability helps clarify why, over the past millennium, pastoral systems have remained so important, especially in areas with increasing aridity. How the past can inform the futureAncient livelihood strategies offer a playbook for surviving climate change today. Our analysis suggests that over thousands of years, communities that combined herding, farming, fishing and gathering were making context-specific choices that helped them weather unpredictable conditions. They built food systems that worked with the land and sea, not against them. And they leaned on strong social networks, sharing resources, knowledge and labour.- THE CONVERSATION

Africans survived climate changes for 10 000 years – lessons for modern times

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-21

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Africans survived climate changes for 10 000 years – lessons for modern times

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-21

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