The histories of African crops remain poorly understood despite their contemporary importance. Integration of crops from western, eastern and northern Africa probably first occurred in the Great Lakes Region of eastern Africa; however, little is known about when and how these agricultural systems coalesced. This article presents archaeobotanical analyses from an approximately 9000-year archaeological sequence at Kakapel Rockshelter in western Kenya, comprising the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from the interior of equatorial eastern Africa. Direct radiocarbon dates on carbonized seeds document the presence of the West African crop cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp) approximately 2300 years ago, synchronic with the earliest date for domesticated cattle (Bos taurus). Peas (Pisum sativum L. or Pisum abyssinicum A. Braun) and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) from the northeast and eastern African finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.) are incorporated later, by at least 1000 years ago. Combined with ancient DNA evidence from Kakapel and the surrounding region, these data support a scenario in which the use of diverse domesticated species in eastern Africa changed over time rather than arriving and being maintained as a single package. Findings highlight the importance of local heterogeneity in shaping the spread of food production in sub-Saharan Africa.

Cleveland Museum of Natural History Cleveland OH USA

Department of Anthropology Stony Brook University Stony Brook NY USA

Department of Anthropology University of North Carolina at Charlotte Charlotte NC USA

Department of Anthropology University of Pittsburgh WWPH 3302 S Bouquet St Pittsburgh PA 15260 USA

Department of Anthropology University of Tennessee Knoxville TN USA

Department of Anthropology Washington University in St Louis McMillan Hall 1 Brookings Dr Saint Louis MO 63130 USA

Department of Archaeology Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology Jena Germany

Department of Archaeology National Museums of Kenya Nairobi Kenya

Department of Asian and North African Studies Ca'Foscari University of Venice Venice Italy

Department of Earth Sciences National Museums of Kenya Nairobi Kenya

Faculty of Archaeology University of Warsaw Warsaw Poland

Faculty of Arts Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Griffith Sciences Griffith University Brisbane Australia

Kakapel National Monument National Museums of Kenya Amagoro Kenya

School of Archaeology Climate Change and History Research Initiative Princeton University Princeton NJ 08544 USA

School of Life Sciences Fudan University Shanghai People's Republic of China

School of Social Science University of Queensland Brisbane Australia

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A dataset of scientific dates from archaeological sites in eastern Africa spanning 5000 BCE to 1800 CE

Early agriculture and crop transitions at Kakapel Rockshelter in the Lake Victoria region of eastern Africa