But how does that prove there was no animal husbandry in Africa in the prior hundreds of thousands of years?
Animal husbandry leaves behind a lot of evidence, starting from different distributions of animal ages and sexes found in bones in refuse pits, to genetic evidence of artificial selection.
This evidence is found everywhere. But it's dateable, and you can find the oldest instances of it in the fertile crescent.
Do you really need me to remind you that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
Maybe “burden of proof” is a phrase to get re-acquainted with? Why do you think an apparently unsubstantiated alternative should be considered despite the archeological record?
Did any of you guys read the article? In the first few paragraphs:
"They’ve successfully analyzed the DNA of two naturally mummified livestock herders who died roughly 7,000 years ago in present-day Libya, which was part of what’s known as the “green Sahara.”
The article says they were practising animal husbandry - I'm guessing they have evidence for that!
So the question is not whether they did it, but whether they started doing it themselves or were taught it by others.
Who said I wanted to prove it did happen?
You cannot prove it didn’t happen, and I also don’t think it was that likely. Both can be true.
I also can't show conclusive evidence that there wasn't a continent of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic 10k years ago that mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Yet if someone enters a conversation about geography with me and inquiries about Atlantis I'm probably going to tell them that it never existed without bothering to wrap that statement in multiple layers of clarification about the evidence and probability estimates and highly unlikely contingencies.
We can't prove that there wasn't some isolated genius who engaged in animal husbandry in Africa before everyone else but was ignored by the rest of his tribe or whatever. But we have managed to place some fairly low upper bound on how much of that could have been happening. At some point it is reasonable to conclude that your typical society in that time and place didn't have access to it.
Well sure a very slim chance is a reasonable position.
Not in the way that people usually use those words. "Reasonable position" generally refers to a reasonable assumption to make or gamble to take. Something technically remaining within the realm of possibility is not that.
And your personal opinion on this alleged standard is relevant because…?
Edit: clarified the question
Because the two of us appear to be attempting to communicate and effective use of language requires some level of mutual understanding of vocabulary. The statement you made does not hold when those words are taken to mean what I broadly understand them to mean.
Which is to say that no, a very slim chance is not a reasonable position to take in most contexts.
Because there's no evidence of it until after it was developed outside of Africa?
You don't have to prove something that doesn't exist. Find the evidence, and prove it does.