Archaeological science has changed all this. Experts now identify between fifteen and twenty independent centres of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development to China, Peru, Mesoamerica or Mesopotamia (which themselves all followed quite different paths, as we’ll see in later chapters). To those centres of early farming must now be added, among others, the Indian subcontinent (where browntop millet, mungbeans, horse gram, indica rice and humped zebu cattle were domesticated); the grasslands of West Africa (pearl millet); the central highlands of New Guinea
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