In two spatiotemporally separate archaeological cases in sub-Saharan Africa, small domestic livestock appear up to 1000 years before cattle. South of Lake Turkana in eastern Africa, sparse domestic caprines and ceramics of the Nderit tradition typical of Lake Turkana appear c. 4000 BP, nearly 1000 years before the first evidence for cattle. In southern Africa, sheep date to nearly 2200 BP, centuries before clear evidence for cattle.

In 2000, I proposed that African savannas presented novel disease challenges to cattle pastoralism. Sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) is a continental-scale risk in brushy areas, but wildebeest-borne malignant catarrhal fever (WD-MCF) and East Coast Fever (ECF) attack cattle in the grasslands that they favor. WD-MCF has a nearly 100% death rate in exposed cattle, and ECF, probably originating with an earlier transmission of Theileria parva from African buffalo to cattle, kills 20% of each cattle cohort. Infection risk is heightened by the three species’ overlapping forage and water requirements. This hypothesis could be falsified by finds of cattle dating to the “Bovine Gap” timespans in either region.

As a test, I reviewed 2000-2017 East African archaeofaunal evidence, plus fauna from a stratified site south of Nairobi, GvJm44, yielding Nderit pottery in its lower level. I discuss results and how infectious disease genomics might offer finer resolution of routes and times of initial transmission of several sub-Saharan ungulate diseases to livestock.

Diane Gifford-Gonzalez is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a zooarchaeologist with interests in the emergence of pastoralism in Africa, publishing on this from the 1970s to the present, and in Holocene human-animal relations around the Monterey Bay, where she has worked from 1990 onward. She is one of the first cohort of zooarchaeologists, writing on zooarchaeological theory and method and publishing An Introduction to Zooarchaeology (2018). She was elected to the International Council for Archaeozoology’s Committee of Honor. She served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, various journal editorial boards, and as President of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists (2006-2008) and of the Society for American Archaeology (2015-2017).