Pounded yam staple (pre-cassava ancient layer) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Boil yam, pound it in mortar and pestle into a smooth, springy mass, tear it off by hand, and dip it into soup: this was a long-established staple of West Africa. Of the fufu well known in the region today, this is the older shape, the one made from yam alone, before the version using New World cassava spread.

The setting is the Niger river basin, the belt that runs from northern Benin across into western Nigeria, known as the yam belt. Its leading crop is the white Guinea yam, a long-established native crop that people selected and raised from a wild species growing in the forest. Cultivation began far back, reaching into the middle of the Holocene. From early on there was, at hand, a yam that could be pounded into a staple.

The plantain served alongside it traces, in origin, to relatives in Southeast Asia. Even so, it took root early across the forest belt of West and Central Africa, and this region became one of the secondary centres of its diversification. At the Nkang site in Cameroon, plant traces marking its presence have been found in layers about 2,500 years old, far older than the 16th-century crossing of cassava.

At the core of this staple is the handwork of pounding boiled yam into a paste, worked up into a springy, elastic mass. It stood on the household table and at gatherings where people ate together, torn off by hand and carried to the mouth through soup. It was made throughout from things close at hand, in ingredient and in tool alike.

In telling of this old staple, the easy stumble is over what the 'oldness' actually is.

When people began raising yam is known to a fair depth. Work following the genes traces how the white Guinea yam was selected and raised from the wild yams of the yam-belt forests, and how it spread through the early to middle Holocene. That a springy staple of boiled and pounded native yam existed in West Africa before cassava arrived is, first of all, not in doubt.

The plantain that long served as the staple's other side was for a time assumed to be a native crop here as a matter of course. Traced to its origin, though, it leads to relatives in Southeast Asia. Plant traces from the Nkang site in Cameroon show it already rooted in the West African forest belt about 2,500 years ago, and that the region became a secondary centre of its diversification. Even so, the plantain settled in long before cassava, and the reading that this dish stands in the old prehistoric layer is unshaken.

Yet the time when yam began to be raised and the time when it began to be pounded into a mass and eaten are not the same. When the way of eating, pounded into a springy paste, first began leaves no trace in the soil. The marks of boiling and cooking may be dug up, but a dish 'pounded until it springs' does not survive underground.

So what can be said with confidence is only the upper line: that before cassava came in the 16th century, a native-yam staple was widely rooted across West Africa. The age of the crop cannot be dragged over to stamp a date on the birth of the dish. Not confusing the part that is known with the part that is not: that is how this prehistory is told honestly.