 Well, good morning everybody and thanks for your patience in sticking around. I of course want to thank the session organizers for their putting us all together in the same room and especially for including what is really a non-technical, broad and shallow paper on Africa. I have learned so much in this session that I wish I could go home and I would maybe write parts of my presentation. However, I think it's worth looking at what we know and don't know about Africa right now and the context of this increasingly rich record for duration. I'd also like to just say that I'm lactose intolerant, I'm mainly European, I'm a quarter-Iberian and also a little bit Native American and whatever ancestor gave me lactose intolerance it started when I was two. So this whole session has given me a stomach ache although I'm a fascinating intellectual. Anyway, what I wish to do today is to outline how East African pastoralism and dairy and that of African hurdles in general made different in its origins and interactions from those of groups practicing other subsistence technologies and property relations. Also from that of Eurasian pastoralism and dairy, at least as we know it right now because my suspicion is as we know more, oops, so sorry. I was trying to drag this down a little. Yeah, this is going to be a mess. It's okay. Yes, you can do that. Alright, next one? Yeah, next one, thank you. So, Africans in Southwest Asia as we all know, so I'll just run through this really quickly, cattle-based area in March, really, really early, San Plain, BC, in the context of sedentary communities that were already committed to cultivation as well as we know hunting still in a big way and the use of small stock as to beverage or membership can be heard this morning but we all know it's work and some of you are coworkers. Evidence suggests that this led also, I'm not so archeological, so it led to the phasing out of extraction of animal fats from bones, bone grease manufacturers especially, but in some cases maybe even marrow recovery when marrow was marginalized. African Saharan dairying emerged in the context of this distinctively mobile lifestyle facilitated and demanded by domestic stock especially toward the end of the African human period with the gradual drying of the green Sahara. Both Lynn Saley and Marshall and Hildebrandt have stressed that African pastoralism from the outset diverged from the counterparts in Southeast Asia in different ways, but primarily pastoralism emerged after the incorporation of domesticates into predominantly farming-based subsistence systems in Southwest Asia and of course dairying was already in existence as well. Whereas in Africa, pastoralism and dairy is the earliest food production and precedes the appearance of settled village farming based on African domesticates by several thousand years. And although this was controversial 15 or 20 years ago, I don't think there's much argument about this today. By 2500 BCE, domestic morphology pearl millet, which is a form of millet indigenous to the African Sahel, was incorporated into probably transhuman pastoral land use with light cultivation in the Tulasi Valley tributary of the Niger River as well as a little bit later in the Lake Chad Basin. So there was no settled farming until about the zero BCE-CE boundary line. And notably, this appeared after a Pan-Sahelian drought in the first millennium BCE that is kind of a huge blank space in the archaeological record as droughts often are. And when you get to have sites appearing again, what you do get is a considerable distribution of settled villages cultivating a variety of African cereals, legumes, and also green vegetables and tree crops of various sorts. Astralism continued and with the drying of the Sahara went into Western Africa, Eastern Africa, and then later on on through Central and Southern Africa. Now, what of daring itself? Saharan rock art depicts cows with full udders and even some scenes that have been interpreted as milking scenes, either contextually or by the position of people in relation to the back end of a cow. And we know now, and most of you in this room are familiar with the done-at-all paper that appeared in 2012, that there are dairy lipids appearing at, they start to make up 50% of shirts, or 50% of shirts had dairy lipids of them between 5,200 and 20, I'm sorry, I've lost my place here, 3800 and the Takkar Kori rock shell to sequence in Southern Olympia. Further support, of course, for the daring comes from genomics where Tishkoff's at all, or pioneering work, showed the diversity of snips that appear to be associated with lactase persistence. And I know some of you in this room know this much more than I do, so I'm just going to leave it there. However, once again, when you have both of these lines of evidence pointing to around the same period of time in the emergence of the use of milk and the traits, and we've already heard how there can be this plus and minus and maybe that I always like to wet my finger and hold it up like this when we're talking about those age estimates based on mutation and selection rates. These accord pretty well, Tishkoff at all estimate accords pretty well with what we've seen in the archaeological pottery fabric. Whoa. Now, I want to pick up on something that actually Christina mentioned, which is that I think too that daring is really a solution of sorts. Pastoralism is a solution, and dairy pastoralism is a solution to living in dry, grassy, and highly climatically variable environments. Not only can you convert grass, which you can eat directly to human food in the form of meat, but also in the form of milk, which allows you to keep the birds at a certain level. And once you are committed, in these terms, to ensuring her survival, and these are zones that are not very good for cultivation, you're going to favor the survival of female animals. And lots of livestock studies of African pastoralists have shown that males are taken off in most of these species anywhere between very early in their lifetimes, like in the first six months for male cattle in some areas, to a year or two in some other areas. And catrines, it's usually about a year and a half for the males. Females are allowed to breed. 16% plus losses are common today, even with artificially drilled boreholes and other sources of support systems for livestock. So traditional pastoral systems have tried to create dual insurance policies, if you will, one being barf loan networks of reciprocal livestock loans and gifts, which will allow one to replace livestock with the other, of course, is keeping as many females alive as possible during the good years in order that some come through the bad news. And I would say that milk is the optimal lifetime product for these females. You could also breed them. But repeated breeding, which was done in Africa during drought periods, tends to run the livestock down. And of course, what you're trying to do is foster the survival of females. So the only other thing that I'd like to say about this, which is something that sort of came in earlier, has to do with who really benefits the most selectively from being able to digest lactose as well as casine. And those are weaned children. And as many of you know probably from studying a little bit about droughts and human suffering in the world today, it's actually weaned children, or children whose mothers don't fail, who are the most vulnerable to dying. So that is a real selective pressure cooker for marginal environments where people commit to pastoralism, are also those environments where selective selection is going to be the highest. So we can go back to that in discussion. Now, I did throw in something about resistance. And I want to back up the camera a little from all the great science that's been done in here and think about the pastoralist and dairy pastoralist as people. People with stakes, with skin in the game as some Americans say, who have specific interests that may over time be expressed in the rejection as well as the acceptance of technological innovations. So what we may be seeing in East Africa with close analysis of the following needs is a phenomenon with which governments in Africa as well as other parts of the world were pastoralists who were quite familiar. And that's pastoralist reluctance to cede over any control of their autonomy and ownership and movement to others. Despite government's best efforts to constrain pastoralist autonomy, they are deemed annoyingly resistant to the point of some governments trying to exterminate them to incorporation and on terms other than their own. This may actually have a long history. And there are some rare bone modifications from the site of Avid Mukhangi at Le Kenyan Hill, which let me think this through a little bit. I'll be quick. This is an Inselberg, not too far from Nairobi, about 40 kilometers southeast, with a very dominant microbiolithic tool tradition for early pastoralist sites, typical ceramics as well of the early pastoralist sites that occupied the Central Rift, the Othikopiti Plains, the Mara Loita and the Serengeti Plains from around 1000 BCE until about 1200 CE. As if other sites in the region cattle predominate at this site. And it's interesting when you think of the turnover rates, lifetime cycles for cattle versus sheath and goats, that there's so many cattle. It means they think that there were a lot of cattle and not that many sheath and goats. Now Le Kenyan also has a lot of animals in the 24 to 36 month age of death, which is very different from anything you see in modern cattle and they are a bigger cattle than what you would see in comparable herds today. Reflecting perhaps at richer environments, you can talk about why. Now at this point in time, people using iron and producing iron implements are only about 600 kilometers away, which is not much when you consider pastoral rounds of movement in a year and especially the overlapping communication systems that one finds between different regional populations. However, for a good deal of time from at least 200 before the Common Era until 1200 of the Common Era, these pastoralists did not adopt metal. They stayed with stone. And the reason that I started thinking about this was because they found some marks of metal at this one site. There's something like 10,000 microlists and other stone tools and debitage at this site and then there were remarks that several of us, including a forensic anthropologist, have decided, this is sort of hard to see, could only have been made with some sort of metal tools. There are none of the hallmarks of the sorts of stone tool traces that you see, shoulder rings, rivations, any of that, in or on any of these surfaces. So I started thinking what is going on here and one of the things is that most archaeologists, although they would reject 19th century evolutionism, tend to implicitly assume that technological innovation will spread almost automatically through populations. And my question was, well, gee, if a little metal was good for a few people at this site, why not? And I think it was because the esoteric practices of these metal producing people and the social power that it appointed those with that esoteric knowledge were deemed a certain kind of threat to people that have property relations who could do very well without metal tools. And it wasn't until farmers who returned to their areas and adjacent areas that great numbers of pastoralists did not convert to metal tools. And in that situation, there was a kind of encapsulation as a subservient cast of metal workers within East African pastoral societies. So it is simply, if I will, you know, I know I'm over time and I'll just stand here. So a moment to step back and think, well, you know, this is fascinating stuff and I'm just so fascinated by the word people are doing. But to think about the stakes of adopting or not adopting a technology, including daring among certain people. What does it give them? What does it get them? And it's not always just nutritional. There may be some social considerations of power and asymmetries between interacting groups that people are taking into account in those decisions. Thank you for your patience.