Editing Finger millet (section)

== History ==
Finger millet originated in [[East Africa]] (Ethiopian and Ugandan highlands). It was claimed to have been found in an Indian archaeological site dated to 1800 BCE (Late Bronze Age);<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bk9RHRCqZOkC&pg=PA21 |title=The Story of Our Food |publisher=Universities Press |year=2003 |isbn=978-81-7371-293-7 |page=21 |author=K.T. Achaya}}</ref> however, this was subsequently demonstrated to be incorrectly identified cleaned grains of hulled millets.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Fuller |first1=Dorian Q. |title=Harappan seeds and agriculture: some considerations |journal=Antiquity |date=June 2001 |volume=75 |issue=288 |pages=410–414 |doi=10.1017/S0003598X00061068|s2cid=161052214 }}</ref><ref name="fuller2">{{cite book |author=Fuller, Dorian Q. |editor1=Neumann, Katharina |editor2=Butler, Ann |editor3=Kahlheber, Stefanie |title=Food, Fuel and Fields: Progress in African Archaeobotany |chapter=African crops in prehistoric South Asia: a critical review |publisher=[[Heinrich-Barth-Institut]]|series=Africa Praehistorica 15 |year=2003 |pages=239–272 |isbn=3-927688-20-7 |url=http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tcrndfu/articles/African%20SA%201%20250.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~tcrndfu/articles/African%20SA%201%20250.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live}}</ref> The oldest record of finger millet comes from an archaeological site in Africa dating to the 3rd millennium B.C.<ref>{{cite journal |author1=Hilu, K. W. |author2=de Wet, J. M. J. |author3=Harlan, J. R. Harlan |year=1979 |title=Archaeobotanical Studies of Eleusine coracana ssp. coracana (Finger Millet) |journal=[[American Journal of Botany]]|volume=66 |issue=3 |pages=330–333 |jstor=2442610 |doi=10.1002/j.1537-2197.1979.tb06231.x}}</ref>

By 1996, cultivation of finger millet in Africa was declining rapidly because of the large amount of labor it required, with farmers preferring to grow nutritionally-inferior but less labor-intensive crops such as [[maize]], [[sorghum]], and [[cassava]].{{r|:0|p=39–40}} Such a decline was not seen in Asia, however.{{r|:0|p=42}}