Chemical analysis of pottery reveals first dairying in Saharan Africa in the fifth millennium BC

Research by Julie Dunne, a PhD student in the Organic Geochemistry unit of the School of Chemistry  appeared on the cover of Nature on 21 June.

The study, co-authored by Professor Richard Evershed, presents the first unequivocal evidence that humans in prehistoric Saharan Africa used cattle for their milk nearly 7,000 years ago.

The cover image of the issue, by Roberto Ceccacci, shows a rock-art representation of domesticated cattle from the Wadi Imha in the Tadrart Acacus Mountains of the Libyan Sahara which is between 5,000 and 8,000 years old.  Similar images – some of which even include scenes of milking – are widely distributed in the region and suggest that cattle played a big part in the lives of ancient humans in the 'Green' Sahara during the Holocene.

Rock art is notoriously difficult to date.  However, Julie Dunne and colleagues carried out isotope analysis of absorbed food residues in pottery excavated from an archaeological site in the region.  This confirmed that domesticated cattle, and a dairying economy, were part of early Saharan pastoralism.

The studies received widespread media coverage around the world, including articles in all the UK broadsheets and on the front page of The New York Times (rock art dating) and in New Scientist and Scientific American (dairying).