Which finding, if true, would most directly challenge the assertion a… | Verbal SAT Question

The Bantu expansion refers to the gradual dispersal of Bantu-speaking peoples (which today include, among other groups, the Baganda in Uganda and the Chewa in Malawi) and their languages from an ancestral homeland in West-Central Africa across much of sub-Saharan Africa over approximately 3,500 years, starting about 4,000–5,000 years ago (ya). Citing the discovery of pounding equipment dating as far back as 5,000 ya consistent with processing of plant foods, some researchers have asserted that the Bantu expansion can be explained by the farming/language dispersal hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that the dispersal of many of the world’s large language families—for instance, Sino-Tibetan—was driven primarily by the adoption of agriculture.

Which finding, if true, would most directly challenge the assertion about the Bantu expansion presented in the text?

Among the earliest archaeobotanical evidence of plant farming in East Africa, which Bantu-speaking peoples may have reached as early as 3,500 ya, are traces of cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), a legume crop believed to have originated in West Africa, which were discovered in the Kakapel Rockshelter in present-day Kenya.

Reconstructed vocabulary from Proto-Bantu, the ancestral language from which all later Bantu languages descended, contains terms for some wild plant species that early Bantu speakers actively managed and cultivated but that were never fully domesticated into true crop plants.

Lexical reconstructions indicate that the earliest Bantu speakers’ words for yams, starchy tubers that are today an agricultural staple throughout sub-Saharan Africa, were inherited from languages predating the arrival of Bantu ancestral groups in their homeland.

The earliest unambiguous archaeobotanical evidence of plant cultivation and domestication in West-Central Africa consists of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) found in three sites in present-day Cameroon dated to around 2,200–2,350 ya and in one site in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo dated to around 2,200 ya.