The earliest food producers in Africa were mobile pastoralists who left limited archaeological traces. As a result archaeologists studying the spread of food production in the region have difficulty distinguishing early pastoralists from hunter-gatherers with whom they interacted. This geo-ethnoarchaeological study contributes to the resolution of the problem through identification of sediments...

Mobile pastoralists provide major contributions to the gross domestic product in Chad, but little information is available regarding their demography. The Lake Chad area population is increasing, resulting in competition for scarce land and water resources. For the first time, the density of people and animals from mobile and sedentary populations was assessed using randomly defined sampling ar...

Cape York pastoralists and Aborigines have jointly called for state and federal governments to legislate 1⁄4 a form of statutory co-existence of title on pastoral leases. 1⁄4 [A] marathon seven-hour meeting in the Queensland town of Coen last week 1⁄4 sought to address the uncertainty and ® nancial dif® culties ̄ owing to Cape York pastoralists from the Wik people’ s claim to a large area of Cap...

Human parents require significant support to raise multiple, highly dependent offspring. Grandmothers are often highlighted as key allomothers (non-maternal caregivers) and their presence is frequently associated with increased child survivorship, leading some describe humans cooperative breeders. Equally well documented the diversity of human childcare systems, where a wide range individuals i...

Pastoralists employ different strategies to minimize the risk of losing their livelihood due to drought, disease, and other disasters. Livestock transfers have been considered critical because they provide not only a safety net during disasters but also contribute to the resilience of pastoral societies by allowing pastoralists to rebuild their herds after disasters. I examine whether and how l...

Introduction Since the 1990s, international organisations and funding bodies have become increasingly interested in the plight of pastoralists. Donors have compelled recipient countries with large numbers of pastoralists to take on board this agenda, pressuring governments to focus more on pastoralist issues in their Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Increasing donor support for the pa...

There is increasing interest in rural development circles in promoting alternative livelihoods opportunities for pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihoods. However, there is very little empirical evidence that effectively evaluates the impact of the existing approaches. As pastoral and agro-pastoral production conditions change, due to factors such as increasing competition over natural resources ...

We explore how diet diversity differs with agricultural seasons and between households within pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihood systems, using variety of foods consumed as a less complex proxy indicator of food insecurity than benchmark indicators like anthropometry and serum nutrients. The study was in the central part of the rangelands in Uganda. Seventy nine households were monitored for...

There is much land in pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa that could be converted to irrigated agriculture and thus provide an alternative or additional livelihood for pastoralists. There is a long history of successful indigenous irrigation in the Horn of Africa but interventions by outsiders to involve pastoralists in irrigation in the last sixty years have largely failed. The causes for fai...